


Hulk vs. Modern Feminism

by Red_I_Am



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Marvel (Comics), The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Comedy, Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 02:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21008375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red_I_Am/pseuds/Red_I_Am
Summary: When Bruce Banner gets vamped, there's only one thing that can help Faith stop him: The Incredible Hulk!





	1. Hulk vs. Globalization

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. It uses characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel Comics without permission from their original owners. Faith and Drusilla are the property of Mutant Enemy Productions, and Bruce Banner and the Hulk belong to Marvel Entertainment.
> 
> Author’s Notes: Despite being another Marvel/BtVS crossover this is completely unrelated to my other fic, Small Town Heroes. Special thanks to my wife, who I’m legally obligated to call the best beta reader ever.
> 
> Warnings: This fic contains character death, crude sexual references, 1980s hair-metal songfic, free market capitalism, inaccurate portrayals of strippers, bad science, The Dukes of Hazzard, intermediate Spanish and references to competitive barn painting. Please don’t hold this one against me, I don’t normally do this.

***

There were numerous myths and theories surrounding The Incredible Hulk. John Kramer, an environmental activist from Essex, believed the Hulk was immortal. When the bombs finally fell and mankind annihilated itself in a well-deserved flash of colossal stupidity, the only things left would be the Hulk, cockroaches, and byproducts from the mind-controlling chemtrails left by airplanes. John also believed the best way to inform the public of his theory was with large placards and repeatedly getting arrested for indecent exposure.

Julie Miller, a graduate student from Arizona State, wrote a dissertation claiming the Hulk wasn’t immortal, but his pants were. After spending the first three years of her academic career failing to find pictures of the Hulk’s schlong on the Internet, she concluded that while science could explain the Hulk (even if it did so reluctantly, because if your gamma bombs turn people into world-destroying monsters, then you are failing at the very basics of bomb building), it could not explain how he always managed to keep his pants on. Her hypothesis focused on the annoying prudishness of higher powers.

Finally, Billy Parkins, age twelve, argued that the Hulk used a magic cape to fly and could shoot laser beams from his eyes. It was widely accepted that Billy Parkins would not go far in life.

All three of those theories were put to the test on the night of June 12th when an interdimensional portal opened in upper earth orbit and, much like Billy Parkins, chucked up something green. The green blob plummeted through the night sky towards earth like a world-destroying asteroid burning up in the atmosphere, full of impotent rage and intent on smashing the puny green and blue planet beneath it. A Georgia man mistook the green streak for a shooting star. A passing vengeance demon, whose hearing aids needed new batteries, misheard his wish and he spent the rest of his short life with a twelve-inch fang until being killed by an overzealous slayer.

The screaming blob of fury burned across the night sky as it passed over Florida, America’s fang, where the blue-haired old ladies drove with their emergency blinkers permanently on. It wisely kept going. It shot past Mississippi and Louisiana without stopping—there were parts of those places that weren’t kind to green-skinned folks. Texas would have made for a nice adventure, but the state had well-honed survival instincts and threw up a surprise twister to rebound the angry green giant over its Northern border.

It landed in the most boring place in the world: the Oklahoma Panhandle. By no small coincidence, June 12th also happened to be the last time anyone called it boring.

***

Mandy-Lynn “Andy” Jackson had super powers. She couldn’t lift a mountain, fly or turn invisible. But she could take a barrel of Saudi Arabian crude oil and ship it through a 120 mile man-made canal that split two continents where it would be delivered to a German chemical plant. Through a highly advanced process, which had taken nearly the entirety of human existence to develop, she could transform that oil into millions of tiny plastic pellets. She could send those pellets across the world to a Chinese factory where they would be molded into a five-inch car with wheels that spun. She could ship that car over the Vietnamese border, where it would be sprayed with bright lead-based orange paint and have a confederate flag stamped onto the roof. Mandy had some people in the Czech Republic take over from there, and they’d wrap the car in plastic packaging and a cardboard backing painted with pictures of said car flying over a broken bridge with explosions in the background. Finally she could ship it by freighter, train and truck to Oklahoma, where it would be placed high on the store shelves as a toxic-orange trophy to capitalism. That lump of orange plastic’s birth involved a trip around the world and more miles than many real cars had, and it would still be sold for profit at $1.95. No other superhero could come close to matching that. Even the mighty Walmart needed $2.45 to do the same thing, and that’s why they were losing.

Of course, Andy only had a small role in the process as night-clerk at Beaver County’s only MaxMart, home of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee. But she still stood proud and tall at her station. This minimum wage job was a twenty-year dream come true.

Unlike most people, Andy’s life had begun at age six during her first trip to MaxMart. She’d wandered its bright clean aisles with wide eyes. She’d found stuffed animals, yellow sandals, scented candles, bikes with peddles, and water guns with handles. She played with speedy hot wheels, red high heels, easy bake meals, and hats shaped like seals. There were fuzzy slippers, toe nail clippers, cheese dippers and sweaters with zippers. She found scented lipsticks, hair clips, potato chips, lace slips, miniature pirate ships, mugs, bugs, rugs, drugs, pugs, jugs, plugs, and men who said ugh. There were video games, dresses for dames, picture frames, and toys you aimed. She’d craned her tiny neck to look up at the forbidden mysteries on the tops of shelves, and then gotten down on her knees to find the hidden treasures on the bottom. It was the Garden of Eden cut from heaven and given to the great land of Oklahoma.

She hadn’t wanted to ever leave, and no one was going to make her. Daddy had finally drafted a dozen store employees, four sheriff deputies, and an old Indian trapper to corral her in the baked goods section. She’d thrown a temper tantrum that set off the Oklahoma storm sirens as a dozen men dragged a six-year old girl from the store, and her tear-stained eyes had watched the departing MaxMart through the back window of Daddy’s pickup. But she’d made a vow: the walls of the MaxMart would be her church, and she’d be its prophet (much to the fiery anger of Grandma “It’s the Devil’s Work” Jackson).

The next day she’d tried to hitchhike back to the MaxMart. Highway patrol had found the six-year old walking along Route 64 and, after several calls for backup, eventually managed to drag her tazed body back home. Daddy had yelled and screamed, then grounded her for a year. She’d tried again the next day.

Everyone had assumed she’d grow out of her obsession, but like a fat kid at McDonalds she kept going back for more. She’d learned to read by memorizing the autobiography of Max Von Warman, the MaxMart founder. As a teenager she’d hung black and white paintings of him with his handle-bar mustache on her bedroom ceiling. She’d lived by Max Von Warman’s rules for women and kept herself free of impurities like alcohol, sexual intercourse with men who weren’t Max Von Warman, suffrage and white bread. She ignored the writings of his critics, who claimed Max Von Warman’s thousand-year reign of low prices was based off of a series of human sacrifices back in the 1930s.

On her eighteenth birthday Andy had marched into the MaxMart and handed over an employment application, which she had filled in four years prior. It was the greatest day of her life and a moment that was only topped by every $7.25 benefit-free hour that followed. Andy’s unbridled enthusiasm had catapulted her through the ranks to the deserted night shift, where she wore her neatly-pressed brown uniform and a bright smile for the rare customer who walked through her doors.

On the sweltering night of June 12th the store’s automatic doors made like her sister and spread open to let in another man. Like an old man on counterfeit Viagra, Andy’s smile wilted. This was going to be a problem customer. Andy personally believed that any MaxMart visit called for the finest silk garments, though the official dress code simply required shoes and a shirt. This man had neither.

He was scrawny, with an unruly mop of brown hair over a sunken face. He was tall, but his face and chest were hairless like a young boy’s. Max Von Warman would not have approved—he didn’t have kind words for men without facial hair. The man’s vulgar bare feet clapped against her pristine linoleum floor as he shuffled forward. One hand clutched at a bundle of purple fabric from the waist of his tent-sized pants, trying to hold them tight around his toothpick frame. The pants were split and shredded, like someone had tried to squeeze them over a hippopotamus. Given the tight nervousness etched into the man’s body, Andy wondered if he’d been wearing the pants when the hippopotamus had decided to join in. He also had some kind of high-tech metal band wrapped around his upper arm.  
  
He stopped a few feet inside the doorway and looked around like a homophobic preacher at a New York gay bar—confused, painfully out of place and slightly curious.

Andy ran her fingers over the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ stashed under her counter and let its pristine pages comfort her. If MaxMart was her church, then this was her bible. It was a set of thirteen three-ring binders, stacked in a row and perfectly alphabetized. Max Von Warman had penned the original twenty-five hundred pages while on the run from Federal Marshals in 1937. This manual was the corporation's blood and soul. Max Von Warman had personally made sure it covered every possible scenario that could ever happen. Ever.  
  
Andy blindly grabbed a binder and let it fall open to the section on customer dress requirements (she’d always had the power to instantly open the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ to the appropriate page for any scenario). Problem customers were supposed to be handled by MaxMart security. As a cashier, she wasn’t to confront them about rule violations. Except the night watchman, Tom, had gone into the bathroom two hours ago and never returned. He tended to spend most nights back there.

She wasn’t supposed to confront customers, but she had to do something to keep this shirtless vagabond from entering her store. She needed to think. What would Max Von Warman do? She felt the answer grow from her heart. Max would have the man smuggled to his ranch in Mexico and hunt him as the most dangerous game. Except that probably wouldn’t work for her—she didn’t have a ranch in Mexico.

He started moving past her station, his shoeless feet desecrating each linoleum tile they touched.

“Excuse me, sir,” she held up the binder as he walked by, a manicured finger pointing at the appropriate prose. “MaxMart, home of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee, has a no shirt, no shoes, no service policy.”

“I swear. If only I could just go one week without hearing that phrase...” his lips pressed tightly together for a moment, and then he let out a defeated breath. “Don’t worry, I’ll just be a minute.” He shuffled past her counter and disappeared down the greeting cards aisle.

No! He hadn’t just done that. It wasn’t right. Andy grabbed her cashier’s phone and hit the button for the on-call manager. It rang for two minutes without anyone answering. Grinding her teeth, she hung-up and hit another button for the back room. Still no answer. She clenched the phone in her fist as she felt a bead of sweat running down the back of her neck. Things were happening that weren’t supposed to happen, and she didn’t like it.  
  
She had just redialed the on-call manager when the man came back. He was now dressed in Cladona Brand Men’s One-Size-Fits-All Sweatpants (on sale in assorted colors for $4.95), a Hewey White Undershirt (five for $3.99), and a pair of MaxMart brand sandals (a Maximum Sale for $2.45). The torn purple pants were now slung over his shoulder. He dropped the price tags onto her counter.

The phone was still ringing in her ear. Andy slowly unclenched her teeth and hung up as she stared at the man. She dropped another _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ binder on the counter and let it fall open to the appropriate section. “Customers are not to be permitted to wear MaxMart-owned clothing away from the dressing rooms and their immediate area.”

“Look, you obviously don’t like me being here. Just let me buy these things and I’ll go away.”

Andy glared at him. This was not proper. It broke multiple rules. And yet what was she supposed to do? This wasn’t just a place of Maximum Low Prices, but also a bastion of the world’s best non-discriminatory customer service. This man obviously needed clothes. Could she really fault him for choosing MaxMart?

Andy made a decision—one that would change everything forever. She slowly closed the binder and put it back under the counter, then took a moment to calm herself. “Do you have a MaxMart Maximum Savings Card?”

He shook his head no.

“Would you like to apply for one? A MaxMart Maximum Savings Card maximizes your maximum low savings.”

He shook his head again.

She started running the packaging tags over her scanner. “Were you able to find everything today?”

“Yes, actually. These are some really good sweats.” He pulled at their elastic waist, stretching them out to the length of his arm. “I usually have to order from the Internet to find pants this stretchy. And you had purple too. I like purple.”

Andy struggled to keep her expression blank. This was the _worst customer ever_. He had actually just compared her store’s selection to the Internet, a wasteland of bad customer service and high-prices that MaxMart was slowly driving out of business. “Sir, this is the MaxMart. We not only offer the Maximum Low Price Guarantee, but also the largest selection of everything everywhere. There is literally nothing that this store does not sell.”

There was a tense moment of silence, broken only by an electronic beep as she ran the remaining tags over the scanner with a well-practiced efficiency.

“$12.02,” She knew she could lower that to $10.88 if she scanned the store’s Maximum Savings Card, usually reserved for customers who couldn’t find their own, but he had insulted her and didn’t deserve that level of treatment.

The man grabbed an exacto knife from a counter-side display and actually opened the packaging right there on her counter. That was also improper, but she ran it over the scanner anyways. “$12.81.”

He used the knife to slice into the waistband of his old purple pants, where he had some kind of hidden pocket sewn into the fabric. He pulled out a piece of long clear plastic, and she was reminded of the time her sister’s boyfriend had swallowed a condom filled with crystal meth while the police had charged up the driveway.

This man’s plastic roll wasn’t a condom, but a tube containing a stack of stapled-together computer printouts, a passport, a USB stick, a credit card holder and a wad of cash. He handed her a Visa card. “Give this a try, though I don’t know whether it’s good here.”

Andy glanced at the name on the card: Bruce Banner. She ran it through her card reader and an error message flashed on her screen.

“That’s what I thought,” he said as he took the card back. “The idiot actually jumped through the interdimensional portal. He’s like a cat. Show him something shiny, and he’ll just try to kill it.”

Andy didn’t know what that meant, except that Bruce Banner was probably on drugs. Perhaps one of her sister’s friends. Still, it would be a gross violation of MaxMart policy to say anything, so she took his offered cash and started to make change.

“The rose strangles the kitten, who screams in brilliant green anger,” a breathy female voice said from behind them, and both she and Bruce gave a startled jump. Andy hadn’t heard anyone else come in, but now there was a pale woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes and clutching a ragged doll at the entrance to her checkout lane. Andy glanced up at the convex mirror that should have shown the woman’s approach, but she wasn’t reflected there.

“I’m sorry, Miss. You startled me,” Bruce Banner said, still breathing a little heavy from the fright. “You really shouldn’t sneak up on me like that.”

“Miss Edith said you would come,” the woman said, her voice barely above a whisper. “From farther than far and away, thirsting to quench his rage.”

“Excuse me,” Bruce nervously said as the woman stalked forward. “I think you should stay back.”

“You’ve come to be saved from the big man. He’s been bad, and now he must sit in the corner. There will be no more porridge for him.”

Bruce started to take another step back, but the woman locked her gaze with his. He froze, mesmerized in mid-step, and stared back at her without blinking.

Andy glanced back up at the mirror, which still didn’t reflect the woman. She was pretty sure that was also against the rules. She picked up the red phone and hit the store-wide intercom button. “Security to Checkout 5. Security to Checkout 5.”

“Calm now,” the woman whispered into Bruce’s ear. “You’ll feel nothing. Don’t let the bad man out. Keep him locked away and Drusilla will make it all better.” Her face warped into a twisted parody of humanity, with a bulging forehead, sharp fangs and burning yellow eyes. Drusilla sank her canines into Bruce Banner’s neck as he silently stared ahead, unmoving. Blood dribbled down his neck and splashed against his new white shirt.

Andy screamed. She wanted to run and flee, but she wasn’t supposed to leave her station. She’d already broken the rules by letting the man purchase his clothes. Was she being punished? What was happening? What should she do? No. She pushed away the fear. She shouldn’t ask what she should do. She should ask what Max Von Warman would do. She grabbed a random _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ binder from below the counter and let it fall open to a page.

Section 13, subsection 41: Vampire Attacks. She’d never seen this section before, which considering the number of times she’d read the manual should have been impossible. Instead of the normal neat rows of printed typeface, the page was filled with handwritten words in a flowing cursive script. Her breath caught in the back of her throat as she recognized the handwriting. It was Max Von Warman, founder of the MaxMart and creator of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee.

She read over the section as Drusilla drained Bruce Banner’s blood. She memorized every curve of the concise yet informative words. She knew what she had to do. Leaving her counter, Andy raced to baby supplies in Aisle 3, Section A (conveniently close to the registers for harried parents who needed to get in and out). A quarter of the way down the aisle was a stack of small white cases. The labels read _Baby’s First Missionary Kit_. She grabbed one and raced back to her counter.

Drusilla now had Bruce Banner lying on the floor with his head in her lap. Her wrist was slit open, and she was draining her blood into his mouth. His lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling.

“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the MaxMart.” She pulled a cross from the kit and marched forward.

Drusilla hissed and jumped to her feet as she started backing away, dragging the limp body of Bruce Banner with her.

“Miss, please put him down and exit the store.” Andy said as adrenaline pumped through her veins. She imagined herself as Max Von Warman, facing down the supernatural evils of socialism. She stepped back to her spot behind the checkout counter, still holding the cross high. The vampire hissed again, but Andy wasn’t scared. Her hand slid under the counter and clenched a binder. She was unstoppable now.

Drusilla dropped Banner to the floor and lunged forward. Andy’s bravado vanished and she reacted on instinct, throwing the heavy thing in her hand. The _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ crashed into the charging vampire’s head and knocked her back onto her butt. Drusilla’s dress rolled up, showing the bottoms of her knickers, and the open binder landed in her lap.

Drusilla growled at Andy and then gave a small glance down at the thing in her lap. In the same way that her gaze had enchanted Bruce Banner, the open binder locked in Drusilla’s gaze. She stared down at it as her features shifted back to human. Her golden eyes faded back to blue as they danced across the page, and a trembling hand reached up to turn to the next page.

“Miss, I need you to close the binder. _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ is the confidential property of the MaxMart Corporation.”

“You wrote it all down,” Drusilla said, her voice choking up as she spoke. She was now ignoring the cross that Andy held only a few feet away and the body of Bruce Banner that lay behind her. “This is... this is everything. You wrote it all down. It’s beautiful.”

“I know,” Andy said. Her first time had been the same way.

“I’ll want this!” The vampire looked up at her with hopeful eyes.

“It’s not for sale.”

“But I want it! I want it now!”

“No.”

“I promise to be good.” Drusilla jumped to her feet and dashed away with the binder clenched in her arms. She stopped at the rows of carts and spent a brief minute struggling to pull one free from the tangle. She came prancing back, pushing a cart with the single binder sitting at the bottom. “Pretty please? I promise.”  
  
“I already told you. No.” Andy held up the cross, though fear was starting to creep into her heart. _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ had been her secret weapon, and now the vampire knew about it. She should never have let it leave her hand.

Drusilla darted forward with inhuman speed, and a fist to Andy’s chest sent her rolling over the counter and into the next checkout lane. The cross fell from her hand as her back smashed into a row of candy bars. Everything blurred for a moment, and she felt like throwing up.  
  
“No!” Andy shouted as she shook off the pain and encroaching blackness. The vampire was loading the other binders from _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ into the cart. “Please,” Andy begged. “Not Volume 11, S-U.”

“Especially Volume 11, S-U,” Drusilla snapped at her as she dropped the last volume into her cart and wheeled it towards the door. Andy watched helplessly from the floor as the vampire disappeared into the night. No. She needed that manual. It was this corporation’s life-line, and she’d let it fall into the hands of evil. They were doomed.  
  
Bruce Banner’s body was still lying on the floor where Drusilla had left him. Andy staggered over to him and felt for a pulse. Nothing. He was dead. She leaned her head against a wall and started to cry.

The doors swished back open and Andy jumped to her feet as Drusilla rushed back in. She ran straight towards them and Andy lurched away.

“I almost forgot what I came for,” Drusilla said with a sly smile as she scooped up Bruce Banner’s body. She gave a little wave with her fingers and hurried back out the door.

No. What was Andy supposed to do now? What would Max Von Warman do? She thought back to the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ section on vampire attacks. It had been written in Max’s own hand. In those brief seconds when she’d glanced over the page, she’d committed every word deep into her heart so they’d never be forgotten. There had been an international phone number in the last bullet point, in a form that hadn’t even existed in Max Von Warman’s time. That was her answer. She picked up the phone and started dialing.

A British man answered after the first ring. “This is the International Watcher’s Council Hotline. How may we assist you?”


	2. Hulk vs. Stripper Heels

Britney was sixty feet tall, with breasts the size of trucks and legs that could mount a pine tree. Her blonde hair lit up the desert night, like a siren beckoning truckers from Route 64. She was the largest neon sign in Oklahoma, and the proud mascot of Britney’s Beaver Banquet. She was sprawled across the words _Live Nude Girls_ like they were a couch, one high-heeled red neon leg dangling over the edge and swinging back and forth in three beats.

Inside the club, Candi awoke sandwiched between bodies like a freshman girl with a new fake ID. Her manicured hand rose up to grasp the pole and she slowly arched her back off the stage, her long golden hair trailing behind her. Another hand grasped the pole and she pulled herself into a squat, then her long legs unfurled until she was standing at her full five-foot-seven height. As her hand released the pole it left a trail of blood on the polished wood, which glowed black under the neon lights.

In an unusual reversal Candi was still wearing her underwear, but her heels were long gone. They were lost somewhere in the pile of bodies that had been her friends, customers and co-workers. The previous events surfaced from her foggy memories, and she turned her gaze away. She’d loved more than a healthy share of them.

Britney’s neon leg continued to kick back and forth, saturating the club with a barely audible buzz. Each time it swung across the window the room turned a little brighter red, and the shadows receded back to reveal the man that calmly leaned against the back wall. Then Britney’s leg would kick back up, and he would disappear back into the darkness.

“We’ve been waiting for you. Are you ready to answer my questions?” he asked her.

Candi’s tongue ran across the back of her teeth. One was loose, and the left side of her face was numb. She felt like a dog about to get snipped—the concept of “ready” could never be applicable.  
  
“You know what happens if you don’t tell me the truth, right? I’ve got my questions. You answer them and everyone gets to live. But if you don’t…”

Candi let her weight slump against the pole. This wasn’t fair. She wasn’t supposed to be the kind of stripper who got beat up by men. She was supposed to be the kind who everyone fell in love with and treated like a princess. She was supposed to be a stripper who was respected for her work and viewed as a model citizen by the rest of her community. Maybe she should have listened to her crazy sister and never taken this job. Someone whimpered and Candi glanced at the corner where the remaining survivors huddled. Maybe this was her chance to be that better stripper. It was up to her to save them. She held her head up and looked the man in the eyes. “If I tell... If I tell you, then you’ll promise not to kill anyone else?”

He giggled at her, high and nasally like a thirty-year old man still waiting for puberty. “Fine. I promise. Let’s begin. Nuclear fusion of elements heavier than me are typically endothermic, while nuclear fusion of elements lighter than me are typically exothermic. What element from the periodic table am I?”

The window exploded with a bang as a black motorcycle arced through the air on a glittering plane of shattered glass. The whole club shook as it crashed into the ground, and its monstrous tires tore across the wooden floor like hungry claws as it crashed through tables and chairs. A black-clad feminine leg unfurled from the beast, planted itself against the floor and the bike jolted to a sudden stop as that single leg absorbed all of its momentum.

Tight curves unwound themselves from the bike, leaving it behind like a used-up man. The rider wore a single-piece black leather body suit that hugged her like paint. A full-head helmet with a silver visor reflected the multi-colored club lights as she slowly took in the scene. As she stepped forward she drew a glimmering shard of metal along with her. It was a katana, and its blade gleamed fire red under the club’s neon lights.

Candi swooned as the helmet fell away, revealing a head of voluptuous brown hair. “Name’s Faith,” her gravelly voice announced to the club. “Anyone wanna get out of here, then now’d be a good time. Anyone wanna stay and watch me kick this guy’s ass, that’s cool too.”

***

“Excuse me,” Bruce Banner hissed the ‘S’ sound as he spoke. “We were having an educational moment.”

“You’d be the new guy then,” Faith said as she picked her way across the bodies. “I came to town for yo’ mama, but you’ll do too.” She glanced to her left. Most of the live ones were making a break for the exit, except for a blonde stripper still sitting on the dancer’s stage and looking at her with puppy-dog eyes.

“Mother’s useless,” Bruce snarled. “She’s lost in her new books. Let’s talk about you. Beautiful woman, big entrance and tight clothing. Looks like I’ve found a hero and a forecast that calls for rape, torture, murder, more rape and school-yard bullying. Only question is the order.”

Faith laughed at him. “You stupid newbie vamps. You guys get that first taste of muscles and think you’ve got some real power. Hate to break it to you, but you ain’t the biggest dog in the yard.”

Banner laughed back at her. “You think this is muscle? You think these teeth are dangerous? Oh, I hope your naivety extends to other areas, that’ll make this so much more fun. I’m dangerous because I’m finally free. I’m free to think the big thoughts. I’m free to envision the world as it needs to be. Most of all, I’m finally free of _him_! I spent so long trying to control and suppress my anger, but it never worked. He always came back! But now I know. I didn’t need to control the anger, I needed to eclipse it. I needed my own emotion to lock around him, and now I’ve found it. I’ve killed him with my hate.”

“Whatever, crazy dude. Welcome to the dust bowl.” Faith darted forward, leapt over a table and sliced her katana up and into Banner’s neck.

There was a series of bright flashes, like a strobe light going off in her brain, and the left side of Faith’s body went numb as her heart pounded twenty extra beats in a single second. The katana went spinning from her hand. When the room came back into focus she was lying on the floor and Bruce Banner was leering down at her. Her head was throbbing and her lungs felt like she’d inhaled a live badger.

“Banner-Tech personal shielding,” he tapped the hi-tech metal band stretched around his upper arm. “Takes a beating better than Ant-Man’s wife.”

He kicked at her, but Faith rolled away and up onto shaky legs. She stumbled as her left leg had to relearn how to move and an insult about him having an Ant-Man’s penis came out as a ‘Blaaagh’ sound.

The world was still spinning like a drunken disco ball and every part of her that wasn’t dead and numb hurt, like how Ronnie must have felt after a session with the bull whip. Banner marched towards her. Faith pawed at a table and half-heartedly threw an empty shot glass into his face. It shattered against a barrier of bright energy that sprang up around him.

“So, should the rape come before or after the murder?” Bruce asked as he picked his way around the broken debris of the club. “I can’t decide. Should I go with both, or show some restraint? Maybe I should start with an appetizer?” He swung a fist at her. Faith leaned back to let it pass overhead, but still felt the prickles of electricity dance across her face where his shield got too close.

In her expert opinion, this was a load of horse crap. She hit things—that’s what she did. Take that away and she was farther up shit creek than a tapeworm.

He kicked at her and Faith dodged back, though still slow and numb. Banner stepped after her, grinning like a maniac. He reached for her again and Faith had to keep scrambling back. One more hit would knock her flatter than a whole bottle of roofies.

Her foot bounced awkwardly against the back wall and she stumbled. Banner lunged with vampire speed. He was less than a second from tearing her throat out and she had nowhere to dodge and no room to throw. She swung a chair into his head and tensed up for another shock. It shattered against the brilliant glow of his shield and pushed him far enough aside that she managed to roll away. She looked down at the broken chair legs that she was still holding in her hands. It hadn’t shocked her this time. What?

“Are you too stupid to understand? What’s your super power? The ability to lower the average IQ of any room?” Banner mocked, sounding exactly like Faith’s second-grade teacher. “When you touch the shield with metal it completes a circuit. When you hit it with wood it doesn’t. You know, the fact that you’re staring at me like a primate trying to comprehend calculus really justifies what I’m trying to do here. All the great villains have a theme, and I’ve decided that mine’s going to be improving the quality of science education in this country. By killing off the stupid people. If you can’t answer basic science questions, then you don’t deserve to keep your throat. I will be the Science Vampire! I’ll kill them all and let Science sort them out!”

“What’s the matter, Nerd? Did the jocks steal your lunch money and leave you hanging from a tree by your underwear?” Faith threw the broken chair legs into his shield, and they disintegrated in a series of sparks.

“Warning,” an electronic female voice spoke from his armband, sounding soft and breathy like an electric blow job. “Bannertech shielding reserves at 15%. Please charge me.”

Faith looked Banner in the eyes and grinned. All she had to do was outlast his 15%. No man had ever outlasted Faith.

She thumped a nearby speaker with her fist, and the echoes of Slash’s epic guitar filled the club. Banner took a step towards her, but Faith held up a single finger and he paused. She started nodding her head along with the opening guitar riff as the pain faded away. She’d lost her virginity to this song, imagining that the bald man on top of her was Axl Rose and his sweet strawberry blond hair. Ever since then Axl had held a special place in her heart, and his throaty voice could always make anything better. The pain faded, and she tensed her muscles as the guitar riff sounded again, gathering up her strength, then let it fade back away as the song’s energy retreated for a brief moment.

“Are we going to…,” Banner started to ask.

_Cha!_

Axl sang the first line of Welcome to the Jungle as Faith tore off the top of the DJ table and slammed it into Banner. It exploded over his shield like a cannon and he stumbled back. She lunged with the long wooden shard that was left in her hand, and Banner scrambled back, vampire instincts briefly forgetting that he had a shield to protect him. His back foot hit a table, and Faith turned the stab into a swing and cracked it across his face like a bat. It shattered against his shield as he tumbled backward.

Banner rolled up and threw a nancy boy’s punch, but Faith had already danced back, grinding her hips and singing along as she moved.

_Welcome to the jungle, we got fun and games!_

She clapped two chairs over his head when he charged. They shattered, and in the space of a second she did it again with another pair, and then a third time. Banner was reeling around trying to find her in the storm of cheap strip-club furniture that fizzled and smoked against his shield, but she was moving fast and staying hidden behind the cloud of particles.

“Rargh!” Banner shifted into his game face and swung blindly. The onslaught of furniture stopped for a brief moment and his yellow eyes darted around, trying to find her in the shadows. “You can’t beat me! I’m better than you! I’m smarter than you! I am your god!”

“And yet the girls still won’t let you cop a feel.” Banner looked up towards the voice just as the rigging for the club lights collapsed onto him. A moment before, Faith had leapt onto the framework, kicked away two supporting braces and jumped clear as it smashed downwards. The heavy lights, which normally shone with the soft colors needed to make strippers look pretty, brilliantly lit up as Banner’s shield electrified the metal framework. He was only down for a moment before shrugging it off with a violent heave. The multi-colored lights kept blinking and panning across the club as he staggered away.

“Shields at 12%,” the electronic voice purred.

Banner lunged for her, both arms stretched out and ready to claw at her eyes. Faith hoisted herself up onto a stripper pole.

_You’re a very sexy girl, who’s very hard to please,_

Faith curled her body, spinning up the pole while doing the splits as Banner’s charge passed underneath her. She touched back down with the elegance of a dancer, then heaved the polished wood out of its socket and spun forward, her body twirling the pole like a helicopter blade. It smashed into Banner’s shield four times in the moment it took him to turn back around, each hit tearing off a piece of the pole and leaving a bright glowing gash along his shield.

He kicked at her again, but Faith flipped back. She caught another pole with her long legs, spun around and launched herself past him. Her skin-tight leather pants sailed smoothly across the stage as she slid into the bar area.

Banner turned to face her just in time to catch a whiskey bottle to the forehead. It smashed against his shield, and the alcohol fizzled as it dissolved against the electric field.

_You can have anything you want, but you better not take it from me._

The next liquor bottle caught him in the chest. Then another in the face. Faith was throwing bottles like machine gun bullets, one hand launching a bottle while the other raced to grab the next. Banner marched forward under the onslaught of alcohol, his shield constantly sparking as bottles shattered against it.

Faith grabbed a certain bottle of scotch, saw the label and set it aside. That one would make a good victory toast.  
  
Banner was making slow progress under the torrent, and Faith was going through alcohol faster than Keith Richards. Banner caught up to her as she threw the last bottle and they stared at each other across the bar.

“What are you hoping to accomplish with all this?” Banner growled.

_I wanna hear you scream._

Faith flicked open a lighter as she rolled into cover behind the bar. The thick sheet of alcohol fumes ignited into an instant inferno.  
  
Banner screamed like a flaming sissy as he backpedaled, his arms flailing like pinwheels. The fire wasn’t penetrating his shield, but the vampire was still panicking. He staggered around for a few moments, then dropped and started rolling, but the kinds of liquids that stained a strip club floor weren’t conducive towards putting out fires.  
  
Faith hopped onto the bar to watch, and was disappointed to see that the fire wouldn’t last. The alcohol fumes had been good for lighting a fast fire, but not sustaining one. Banner eventually sat up as the last flame died, still patting at his clothing.

“Shields at 7%.”

“Not looking good for you, baby. I’m already halfway there.”

“Yeah, but you made one mistake.”

“Oh?” Faith asked.

“You finally stood still.” Banner pointed a finger at her and a bolt of energy lurched from the shield and struck Faith in the chest. The electricity picked her up like a hurricane and carried her across the club, smashing her back onto the main stage.

_And when you’re high you never ever want to come down. So down, sucked down, so down._

Axl’s voice sounded distant and far away, like it was coming through a wall of rubber. Faith’s whole body was numb. She couldn’t feel anything, which was probably worse than if she’d actually been in pain. She tried to move her leg, but couldn’t tell if anything was actually happening. All that she knew was that her face stayed firmly planted on the stage.  
  
A sandaled foot landed in her vision, then the grinning face of Bruce Banner descended down into her view. He reached out a single finger and tapped it against her forehead, and her whole body convulsed with another electric surge.

“Shields at 4%,” the electronic voice purred.

Faith’s heart felt like it was beating a thousand times a second and her lungs gasped fruitlessly at air like a fish out of water. She tried to move her arm, to swing it up and swat at Banner, but only a single finger twitched slightly against the ground.

“Do you know what I recently learned about myself?” Banner asked as he leered at her. “I learned that I hate women. I hate the way their bodies curve and stretch. I hate the way they say things they don’t even understand. I hate the way they drive. I hate the way they say they love you, but then go off and die. I hate them all. Their whole race. What does that make me?”

“You’re iron,” a bubbly female voice spoke from behind them. “Fusion on elements lighter than you are exothermic, and endothermic on elements heavier than you. You’re the twenty-sixth element. Iron.”

Banner turned towards the voice. One of Faith’s arms stretched out and weakly dragged her across the floor.

“Yeah, you’re right. So what?” Banner asked.

“You said that you wouldn’t kill anyone if I answered three questions. That was one.” It was the blonde stripper. The one who had been on the stage.

“I changed my mind,” Banner said. “Forget science. This is more fun.”

He turned back to Faith, but the stripper’s voice interrupted him. “I challenge you to a science-off!”

Banner froze perfectly still for a moment, then slowly rose. He tilted his head to the left, then to the right and the bones in his neck popped. He slowly turned to face the stripper, his eyes glowing yellow. “State the terms.”

“Three questions from you, then three questions from me. You already had your first.”

Faith pulled herself another foot across the floor. She could feel her fingers now.

“Very well,” Banner said. “This won’t take long. How many electrons in the outer ring of silicon?”

The stripper pondered this for a moment, then looked down at her perfectly formed breast. Her lips silently counted, moving past one, two and three. “Four,” she eventually said.

Banner glared at her. “You’re just an ignorant redneck stripper. How do you know this?”

“Is that your question?” she smiled past her stained teeth.  
  
Banner pondered a moment before answering. “Cobalt60 goes through beta decay and eventually produces what type of radiation?”

“Um… duh. Everyone knows that. Gamma radiation.”

Banner growled at her and took a threatening step forward.

“My turn, my turn!” The stripper said as she bounced in excitement, her breasts swaying like water balloons. “What actress played the lead scientist in Contact?”

“What?” the beast roared. “That’s not a real science question!”

“Trivial Pursuit says it is.”  
  
“Of course it’s not! That’s a question for the ignorant sheep! I am a scientist! I am better than them. I stand atop the Mountain beyond their reach!”

_You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die!_

A deep rumble shook the room and a blinding headlight lit up Banner, who shielded his eyes as he looked up in confusion. The motorcycle shot forward, roaring like an angry demon with Faith straddling its back. They crashed into Banner, and he screamed in fury as he was pulled under the spinning front wheel. The motorcycle roared even louder.

Bursts of electricity shot across the bike as the shield hissed under the spinning tire. The back tire continued to propel the bike forward through the club, dragging Banner along with it as Faith clung to its curves. The shield crackled as it left a trail of sputtering flames burning across the floor.

They crashed through the outer wall of the club and hit the pavement. Banner fired another burst of energy into the bike, but Faith rolled off just a moment before it struck. The bike shot into the air like a missile, colliding with Britney in a loud crash that echoed over them.

_It’s going to bring you down!_

Britney’s neon leg came free. Her six-foot long high heel plummeted down like a charging knight’s lance. It impaled Banner, smashing through his body as the last bits of his shield fizzled away. Banner curled up around the giant neon heel that had torn through his torso, fruitlessly pawing at it.

Faith materialized from the dust cloud, dragging a wooden stripper pole behind her. She kicked away the remains of the giant shoe and stood over Banner as he stared up at her and sputtered, trying to say something.

“Got to watch out for those stripper heels.” She drove the wooden pole down and into his heart, then calmly turned and walked back into the club. She settled down on one of the few remaining bar stools, twisted the lid off the last bottle of scotch and took a long drink.

“Wow,” she said as she smacked her lips. “Now that’s the kind of fight that leaves you wanting to reach out and fuck someone.”

The blonde stripper was still there, and Faith nodded to her, then held up the bottle as a drink offer. The stripper picked up a stool and set it down next to Faith. “I’m Candi,” she said. “With an ‘I’.”

Faith nodded and poured her a drink.

“You do this often?” Candi asked.

“Face punching vampires? Yeah, I’m all about the face punching. I’ve made a career out of it. There are these British guys who pay me to travel the country and punch vampires in the face,” Faith to a long sip from the bottle. “Plus I get to light them on fire and cut their heads off. I get a yearly bonus if the world doesn’t blow up.”

“They don’t sound very British,” Candi said.

Something rustled behind them, and Faith glanced back out the hole in the wall. Banner’s body was still lying there, the pole sticking out of his chest. That’s odd, he should have dusted by now. She kept watching. After a moment, the pole suddenly twitched. The hairs along her neck and arms stood up, and she momentarily had the strange feeling that her yearly bonus was in jeopardy.

“Hold on a second,” Faith muttered as she spun out of her seat and approached Banner’s body. She knelt down over him. His whole chest had caved in, revealing the dead organs that should have already dusted. Well, she had hit true. The stripper pole had perfectly pierced Banner’s heart.

His heart suddenly beat once, and the pole waved in the air. Faith stumbled back in shock. Freaky. She leaned forward again for a closer look. The pole had hit his heart, and the muscle directly next to the wood had turned a familiar chalky brown color, like it was trying to dust. The rest of the heart around the dusty brown, the part that was trying to beat, had turned green.

Faith watched with fascination as the green warred against the brown. The dusty ring of dead flesh around the wood seemed to be trying to push outward and spread across the whole body, but the green tint was fighting it. It was pushing back, turning the dead flesh into something that almost looked alive. The heart beat again, and the green part of the heart jumped and grew, surging up and around the pole. The wood snapped, and the top part of the pole fell aside. Faith stumbled back, which saved her head from being taken off as the heart beat again and shot the bottom chunk of the pole out of his chest cavity and into the night sky like a bullet.

Banner’s furious green eyes snapped open.


	3. Hulk vs. Intermediate Spanish

The ladies called him The General Lee. He was 3,200 pounds of bright-orange Detroit steel, with a six-cylinder engine wrapped up in a sleek shell that could go at speeds _literally_ capable of disintegrating a woman’s underwear. He had a tattoo of the Dixie Flag on his roof, but it was done in a respectful and non-racist way. The General Lee provided equal-opportunity rides to any ladies.

He hadn’t been born The General Lee. He was originally Svill’qua Sakn, the Sumerian demon lord of locusts and droughts. His original owner, Bo, had come to Oklahoma running from the law without a penny to his name. Bo had stiffed a discount warlock/mechanic on Fifth Street, and his prized car had been cursed with a spirit from the underworld. Upon his first manifestation in the material plane, Svill’qua had set out to reap the souls of mortals to fuel his hellfires. But Oklahoma had the power to crush anyone’s dreams, and it wasn’t long before he'd taken on his shell's original name and started calling himself The General Lee. These days he spent his nights cruising for girls and getting gassed up on grain alcohol. His father was pissed, but that’s how The General Lee rolled now.

The General Lee had spent the first part of the evening parked at Britney’s Beaver Banquet and talking up a hot little Suzuki motorcycle, which was possessed by the spirit of town bicycles.

“_Vruuummmm_,” The General Lee let his engine growl as he showed off his six pack of cylinders.

“_Cha Cha Cha_,” the Suzuki responded by flashing a headlight and purring. Oh yeah. He was going to rear-end her tonight.

He had just started rolling her way when the club’s wall exploded outwards, throwing wood and drywall across the parking lot. A mean old Harley Davidson came soaring through the cloud of dust. It was big and black, with a throaty growl that drowned out everything around it. It was dragging some human nerd, who was whining and bitching about something or another. The Harley didn’t give a shit, and it shot up on a blast of lightning and dropped the massive Britney’s Beaver Banquet sign onto the nerd. Awesome.

The General Lee watched the crash with the silence and respect that the fellow badass deserved, but then he noticed that the little Suzuki wasn’t looking up at him anymore. He rumbled his engine, but her brights were focused exclusively on the rubble surrounding the Harley. Damn. The Harley was down, but it had still managed to pipe block him. He was going to need to do something better to impress her before she’d let him blow out her shock absorbers.

Being a demon car made him pretty much invulnerable, and he was thinking about picking a fight with an F250, but a better answer came as the wreckage was thrown away and a giant green monster rose from the heap. It screamed as it flexed its arms. “Hulk Smash!”

The General Lee revved his engine. Oh yeah. He was going to kick this guy's ass.

***

The Hulk’s pecs were massive. They were like giant watermelons, each topped with a green cherry nipple. His abs could have been carved with scoops of mint ice cream. His quads stretched out his tight-fitting purple pants like over-stuffed green spinach burritos. Faith probably shouldn’t have skipped dinner before making analogies.

She also shouldn’t have been standing there gawking as Bruce Banner turned into The Hulk. She should have used that time to flee. Instead she just stood there and silently watched as The Hulk confusingly stumbled around and screamed at itself. “Banner shut up now! Banner stop! Banner broken!” He dropped to his knees, and his arms wrapped around his head like a kid scared of the thunder. Faith took a tentative step forward, and The Hulk’s gaze suddenly locked onto her.

Faith had a life insurance policy from Cradle and Cudgel, a firm out of Des Moines that used warlocks to provide real-time up-to-the-minute rates and liabilities on individual life insurance. Cradle and Cudgel packaged and resold the revenue from those policies as complex financial instruments on the world market, which were bought up by hedge funds and large governments. As a direct consequence of that one moment when The Hulk looked across the parking lot at Faith, Singapore’s economy crashed.

“HULK SMASH!” He spoke in all-caps and slammed his ham-sized fists into the ground. The earth shook, and two trucks behind him exploded. He did that cool thing where he didn’t look back as the explosion back-lit him.

No one out-posed Faith. She was capable of twisting her spine in directions that simultaneously showed off her ass and tits. She crouched low while flaring her right leg out and held up a waiting hand. The katana she’d used against Banner came flying through the air, propelled by the explosions, and landed gracefully in her out-stretched hand. She slowly lowered it into an en garde.

The Hulk charged forward.

Faith charged to meet him. She'd dealt with huge demons before. She knew how to do this. She had to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, and that’s exactly what she did. Her katana left small superficial wounds like a bee, and she was launched flying back through the air like a butterfly.

Faith hit the ground hard, skipping across it like a stone. The katana went spinning away. She slowly rolled onto her back, her whole body aching. That punch had only been a glancing blow. She’d dodged most of it, and yet she was still sore like she'd just gone a couple rounds in the Detroit Piston's locker room.

The Hulk suddenly appeared above her, dropping down from the sky like a cruise missile. She tensed, but he landed with his feet on either side of her, and slammed his fists into the ground next to her head, shaking her with a shockwave that rattled her brain.

“BANNER BROKEN. BROKEN! YOU FIX BANNER NOW! YOU MAKE BANNER BETTER!” The Hulk screamed at her. Their eyes met, and Hulk’s gaze briefly softened. “Pretty girl fix Banner. Please?”

Despite the opinion of the people who graded the GED, Faith was not a stupid girl. She knew enough to distinguish between a good idea and a bad idea. The problem was that she just didn’t care. So when she looked up and saw The Hulk’s testicles framed in his purple pants like two giant green peas in a pod, and when her finger’s tightened into a fist, she knew that she was having a bad idea. In fact, she was pretty sure it was the worst idea she had ever had. Ever. She just didn’t care.

In a move best left unspoken and unwritten, Faith used her slayer strength and speed to make like a boxer working a Speed Bag, then rolled out from under his legs and ran. The Hulk screamed, but Faith didn’t look back. She knew she needed some distance. She needed a whole metric shit-ton of distance.

She could hear him moving after her, roaring forward like a freight train. Faith tucked her head down and kept running without looking back.

The sound of tires on dirt made Faith look up in time to see the approaching car. She dropped into a roll just as the car hit a small bump. It launched into the air like that bump had been a catapult. It soared over her and hurtled itself into the charging Hulk. The Hulk caught the car on the sides, but didn’t stop it from smashing into his chest and knocking him down. The Hulk tossed the car aside as he fell.

A hit like that should have crumpled the car, but it twisted in midair and landed intact next to Faith. Knowing a good thing when she saw it, Faith rolled across its hood and jumped through the open window into the driver’s seat. There was no one there. It was just her and an empty car, which was staring down The Hulk like a matador with his bull. Car must be possessed by a demon. “You got a name?” she asked.

The car rumbled beneath her.

“Alright, General Lee. You ever want to live out _Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior_?” The car purred beneath her with a perfect vibration and Faith smiled. Oh yeah. She was going to get along just fine with this bad boy.

She shifted gears and threw the car forward as she and The Hulk charged each other. Faith yanked on the parking brake at the last moment, and the car twisted into a spin that took out The Hulk’s knee caps, sending him crashing down underneath them. Hell yeah! They were going to do this!

The car suddenly stopped moving and Faith smashed forward against the steering wheel. The left side tilted up and Faith toppled down into the passenger seat. The fall disoriented her for a moment, and when she looked up through the driver’s side window she could see the night sky. Then she looked down through the passenger window, where a dirt parking lot and two giant green feet were about 10 feet beneath her.

“Shit!” Faith rolled through the open passenger window just as The Hulk chucked The General Lee into Britney’s Beaver Banquet. The car hit the building like a wrecking ball, tearing through front wall and smashing through the support columns and poles. The ceiling sagged down in the middle with a loud groan. Candi, the beautiful lingerie-clad physicist/stripper who had saved Faith earlier, came running out the entrance just as the building gave up and collapsed in on itself. Candi was thrown forward by the force of the crash, and she landed on her knees in the dirt parking lot.

Faith was still lying at The Hulk’s feet. The beast was staring at the collapsed building and hadn’t looked down to see her yet. Candi started to shakily rise, coughing as the dust billowed around her. The Hulk’s gaze locked onto the blonde, who was clad only in black lace lingerie, and one of his giant feet started to move forward.

“Oh, hell no!” Faith rolled onto her feet in front of The Hulk. She held up her fists and The Hulk paused. “I ain’t going to let you hurt anyone. I’m the hero here. You want her? You gotta go through me first. And I don’t care how big you are or what rumors you may have heard, I don't go down easy.”

The Hulk glared down at Faith as his forehead wrinkled and his eyes narrowed. Thoughts of her own death huddled together in Faith’s mind, and the two stared at each other for the longest seconds of her life. He finally turned away and she released the breath she’d been holding. The Hulk wandered a few unsteady steps back, then dropped into a crouch as his enormous hands rose to clutch at his head.

“Banner broken,” he muttered. “Why Banner broken?”

Faith stood still and answered slowly. “He’s a vampire now. He’s dead. A demon killed him and took up shop in his body. Or your body. Or something. I’m not sure what’s going on in there.”

“Banner puny. Banner always puny. Hulk is strongest there is. Hulk hate Banner.”

“Yeah, he seemed like a bit of a dick.”

“Hulk hate Banner. Banner always tell Hulk to calm. Banner say no smash. Hulk like to smash.”

“What’s Banner saying now?” Faith asked.

Hulk looked back at her and Candi, who had cautiously approached Faith’s side as they’d talked. “Banner want Hulk to do bad things. Banner whisper bad words in ear. Banner say smash pretty girls.”

Faith and Candi both took a cautious step backwards.

“No!” Hulk yelled. “Hulk not smash! Banner is puny! Hulk strongest there is!” He surged to his feet and ran away from the girls. He took one step, then two and leapt on the third. He shot into the night like a rocket. Twenty seconds later the earth shook, like from a small earthquake in the distance. It happened again twenty seconds after that, though the rumble was fainter and farther away. Then it was quiet.

Faith and Candi stood together in silence for another minute as the adrenaline faded. The sound of wood shifting came from the wreckage of Britney’s Beaver Banquet, and they both turned to see The General Lee limply roll out of the wreckage. It coasted up to a motorcycle, which suddenly fell off its kickstand and landed against The General Lee.

“Come on,” Faith tugged on Candi’s shoulder. “Let’s give those two some privacy. He earned it.”

***

Banner shifted against the wooden crate. A wayward screw caught against his bare back and he surged back up as he shifted into vamp face. He chucked the empty crate across the meat packing plant with a roar. It shattered against the concrete ground and shards of wood spun across the floor. He closed his eyes, took an unnecessary breath and forced his human face back. He shouldn’t have done that. That’s not how science vampires behaved. Smashing empty boxes was neither scientific nor particularly evil.

Banner hung his head and settled back down on the neighboring crate. What was the point? He’d been planning on taking over this backwater world, maybe build himself a supermodel harem, a nice palace, and spend his retirement torturing the pathetic humans.

It would have been perfect, except The Hulk ruined everything. It was the story of his life, and apparently his unlife too. What was the point of dying if you couldn’t escape your problems? This was supposed to be his freedom. Free of morality and free of The Hulk. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

And it was even more frustrating that The Hulk had been alive. How was that even possible? They shared a body, and this body was dead. Was Hulk resurrecting himself when he emerged from Banner? That seemed just like the kind of idiotic, stupid thing the big green moron would do. He’d known plenty of people who had treated death as a revolving door, but this was going to get gratuitous quickly. This was why no one liked magic. It didn’t make any sense. Like a kindergarten kid who ate too much paste. Or maybe it was this stupid dimension, too stupid to even know there were supposed to be rules. This was the dimension that rode the short bus. It didn’t deserve a science vampire. He was too good for this place.

Even his own mother, the vampire that had gifted him with this “freedom”, had abandoned him. Banner had awoken in a shallow grave and clawed his way through the dirt like a child ready to enter a whole new world. And there his mother had been waiting for him, nose deep in a stack of binders. She'd ignored his questions as she took in every word from some corporate manual, then eventually shooed him away claiming that the pixies had drunk all of the honeywater, and she needed a new dress for the play. He was probably better off without her.

Maybe he should just go home. He’d probably be able to get a choice rotation as an A-list villain. He could pick out a hero, maybe someone big and dumb like Thor, and start making evil clones. There was some perception that clones had been overdone in the 90s and gone clichéd, but he’d always thought that they just needed a better implementation. Something to make them fresh again—maybe he could go with evil vampire clones.

Something moved at the back of the meat packing plant, far back and deep in the shadows. Bruce glanced at his Banner Tech portable shield. He’d spliced it into the plant’s electrical system, and a small display reported that it was 12% charged, and 82 minutes of charging time remained. As he watched the number ticked up to 13% charged and 152 minutes remaining, then after another second it dropped to 32 minutes. Banner growled at the device and put it aside. It’s not like anything here could actually kill him.

His new nightvision started to fill in the details of a large demon moving towards him. It was almost seven feet tall and female, with deep blue skin, a wild head of black hair and a mouth of the type of sharp teeth that were used for biting and tearing away chunks of flesh. She wasn’t making any attempts to hide herself, and Bruce waited patiently while she stalked forward.

“¿Donde esta la bibliotecha?" it said to him.

“What?”

“¿Donde esta la bibliotecha?!” the demon screamed the words like a battle cry.

“I really really hate this dimension,” Banner muttered.

The demon pulled a book with a garish yellow plastic cover from the folds of her robe and started flipping through the pages. Banner caught a glance at the cover. It was a Spanish to Jhe Blood Scrawl dictionary. There was a picture of a smiling cartoon man on the cover with his intestines ripped out and used to form some kind of runic letters, while a speech bubble asked “¿Hablo Jhe? Si!”

“No, no,” Banner shook his head. “Different humans speak different languages. You can’t just pick an arbitrary language and expect it to work. I speak English.”

The confused demon cocked her head and stared at him.

“Let me be clearer. Go. Fuck. Yourself.” Banner loudly enunciated each word.

The demon started rapidly flipping through the pages.

“Holy crap, you’re so stupid that you’re actually trying to look that up. What should I expect? You’re a demon, a woman and you’re from this backwater inbred dimension. That’s stupidity to the third power. What’s the matter, honey? Did the abortion halve your brain cell count?”

The demon kept looking up to listen to him, then flipped through pages as he spoke.

“Still struggling? I got something I could stick inside you that’d more than double the IQ in your body. Maybe that’s not a good idea though. There isn’t a bag thick enough to hide your face, sister.”

The demon eventually gave up and flipped back to the Jhe to Spanish section. “Mi nombre es Las Hermanas de Jhe.”

“You are literally hurting me with your stupidity. If I had a heartbeat, I would be having chest pains right now.”

“Su nombre es Bruce Banner.”

That got his attention. This was not a random encounter. “How do you know my name?” Banner asked as he rose from the crate and his eyes shifted to yellow. She looked confused, and he repeated himself louder and slower. “HOW. DO. YOU. KNOW. I’M. BRUCE. BANNER.”

“Veo el momentos de Bruce Banner.”

“I see the moments of Bruce Banner…” He repeated the demon’s words, pondering them. “You see time? You have a prophecy about me? That’s it, I’m out of this hellhole. Sayonara, chicka. Hasta la bye-bye.”

Bruce turned to walk away, but he took a startled step back when more shadows began to move across the warehouse. She hadn’t come alone. There were hundreds of similar demons. All female and all dressed in the same ragged armor. They hissed like snakes through their sharpened teeth as their shadows moved across the walls. He was surrounded. His certainty that nothing here could kill him started to fade.

The crowd parted for something big. It was like the other demons, but huge and muscular. It must have stood nearly twelve feet tall. Bigger than even The Hulk. Her face was old and wrinkly, with long ears and a boney crest running down her blue head. Large slabs of iron armor had been welded directly onto her body, and each of her fingers ended with claws as long as daggers.

“Mama Bell Grande,” the original demon whispered as she sunk to her knees. The rest of the clan also knelt, and it was just him and big mamma left standing.

“Bruce Banner,” Mama Bell Grande whispered through her teeth, her mouth struggling to form human words.

Bruce silently nodded. Were they here for The Hulk?

“Bruce Banner. Tierra. En feugo.”

Bruce shook his head as he looked up at her. “What? I don’t understand.”

Mama Bell Grande roared. The sound was deep and inhuman, and the walls shook as it reverberated across the room. The demon clan started chattering. Then Mama Bell Grande raised a hand and everyone fell silent. One of her long bony hands stretched out, and a claw lightly scratched across his bare chest, leaving a thin trail of blood. “Bruce Banner,” she said.

Then her clawed hand tapped against the ground, the long nail pointing down to the Earth. “Tierra.”

She stood up, and the entire clan rose with her. She stretched out her arms to the sky. “En Fuego.”

Banner nodded as a smile replaced his cautious expression. They weren’t here for The Hulk. They were here for the bomb maker. He looked Mama Bell Grande in the eyes and nodded.

The demon clan erupted in throaty cheers.

“I’m going to need some supplies first. Girls, let’s go shopping."

***

“So what’s up with the science stuff?” Faith asked Candi as they cruised down the highway in The General Lee. “How did you know the answers to Vampire-Nerd’s questions back there?”

“I was a big nerd back in high school,” Candi explained. “I knew more than any of the teachers. I wore baggy clothes and these coke-bottle glasses. I always wore my hair up. I was going to be a physicist, and I read every science book I could find. The jocks and cheerleaders would always pick on me. Then one day, without me knowing, the captain of the football team, RJ, made a bet with his head-cheerleader girlfriend, Tina, that he could make me popular by prom. He pretended to break up with Tina and go out with me. We won the big football game, I got a makeover, let my hair down and people actually started liking me. But then I found out about the bet and broke up with RJ. When prom came along I was actually voted prom queen instead of Tina, and then RJ was dancing with me. Tina got so mad, but then her dress got torn off by the goat who was our school mascot. I learned a valuable life lesson as the whole school applauded me and RJ kissed me. It was better to be popular than to be a nerd. So I quit studying science and became a stripper.”

Faith nodded. Smart move.

“So did Tina and the goat…” Faith’s question was interrupted as something darted into the road in front of them. Faith slammed on the breaks, but The General Lee sped up and smashed into a humanoid figure, which rolled across the hood and over the windshield. Faith pulled up on the parking brake, and the car twisted into a skid that made the tires squeal.

Faith hopped out the window when the car finally came to a full stop. There was a body lying behind them on the road. It slowly rolled onto its back as Faith approached, and a blue skinned demon looked up at her and growled. Faith made a ‘take care of this’ motion with her hand, and The General Lee shot forward and hit the demon again. It had just started to rise, and the demon was popped back up into the air as the car crashed into her. She hit the ground hard.

“Give it one more,” Faith said.

The General Lee backed over the demon once more. This time the demon didn’t rise.

Candi crawled out of the passenger seat and started walking up behind Faith as she knelt next to the motionless demon. “Are you sure it’s…”

The demon’s eyes snapped open and it lunged at Faith with its razor sharp teeth.

Faith didn’t flinch as her fist snapped into the demon’s face, driving its nose back into its brain and finally killing it.

“Is that a demon?” Candi asked.

“Yep,” Faith said. “Sisterhood of Jhe. Race of female warrior demons. Hard to kill. Big on ending the world and flesh eating. Ran into these girls back in Sunnydale. That was a weird night.”

“Weirder than this night?”

“Remains to be seen. Wonder what it’s doing out here?” Faith stood up and looked across the empty highway. “These things usually travel in packs. Maybe a scout?”

“Maybe they’re related to The Hulk?”

“Doubt it. These chicks are demons. The Hulk wasn’t a demon. I would have sensed it. But there’s obviously something going on here. We’ve just got to figure it out. Except I’m not good at this whole ‘figure things out’ bit. That’s usually the Watcher’s jobs, but I lost my cell at the club.”

“If it doesn’t relate to science or sexual positions, I’m not good at figuring stuff out either,” Candi said. “But we’re the heroes here. We’ll get it spot on if we wildly speculate. So what was The Hulk?”

“Space alien?” Faith suggested.

“A space alien that shares a body with a vampire?”

“I’ve seen weirder.”

Candi shrugged. “Okay, you’re the expert. Let’s go with space alien. We’ve got science vampires, apocalypse demons and space aliens. What do they all want?”

“To probe our bodies and steal our precious fluids?” Faith asked.

“That would make sense,” Candi agreed. The General Lee rumbled, and Faith knew that he also agreed.

“How are they going to probe us?” Faith asked.

“They’ll use machines.”

“Cold machines made out of metal?”

“Like a gynecologist,” Candi said. “And gynecologists are doctors, like that science vampire. That’s the connection!”

Faith nodded. “And the demon warriors are all female, so they also need gynecologists. So that means…”

Both Faith and Candi were silent for a moment as they pondered the implications, then Candi suddenly snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it! The demon warriors are going to hire the science vampire to build a gamma bomb to destroy the world. They must be going to the MaxMart for supplies right now!”

“Let’s roll,” Faith shouted as she ran to The General Lee and butt slid across the hood. She jumped through the open driver’s window, and then patiently waited as Candi clumsily climbed through her own window. Faith pressed down on the gas and the car shot off into the night so fast that her underwear _literally_ disintegrated.


	4. Hulk vs. America's Gun Culture

Like the day Pee Wee Herman had been arrested for masturbating in an adult theatre, something in the world had changed. What had once been wondrous and beautiful had become gross and disgusting. The lights no longer shined as bright, the floors no longer stayed as clean, and the hours seemed to stretch out for longer. When a customer did the bi-weekly projectile diarrhea spray across the bathroom it no longer smelled like roses and fresh KFC. Like the black and white “life is hopeless without our product” part of an infomercial, the world was falling apart.

The MaxMart had lost its way because Andy had failed it. The _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_, a force of nature masquerading as thirteen three-ring binders, had fallen into the hands of evil. And now the store was dying without its lifeblood. Sure, the corporation might be able to linger on for a few decades on the obscene profits to be found exploiting cheap Chinese labor and an artificially weak Yen, but now it would have to do so without the Disney-like magic. All because Andy Jackson, a lone store clerk in Beaver County, had lost their employee manual. Also, some guy got killed.

Now Andy stood alone at her station, silently watching the clock tick by. Each second brought her closer to the end of her lonely night shift, and each second seemed to come slower and slower than the one before. She passed the time by trying to mentally calculate how much she got paid per minute and per second at minimum wage. It turned out that if she took a second to steal a penny from the cash register, she’d actually be making more than five times her normal wage for that brief second.

Andy no longer loved her job. It was no longer the culmination of her life-long dream. Something had changed that night she’d lost the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_. Now she clocked in late and left early. She spent her evenings just waiting for her shift to end. The MaxMart had become, dare she say it, just another Walmart clone.

Andy no longer thought back to that distant time a few days ago when her store had its copy of _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_. Thinking about it just made it worse. Instead she swiped a candy bar from the check-out lane and read the text on the wrapper: Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, BHT, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Dextrin, Blue 1, Red 40, Citric Acid, and Sodium Citrate. Those sounded like they might be some of the world’s deadliest poisons. If she were lucky this candy bar could be her gateway to a chocolate seppuku. Andy stuffed the bar into her mouth and bit down. Goodbye cruel world.

The store’s doors swooshed opened and Andy spit the candy bar into the waste bin under her counter. For all her many new faults, she could not let a customer see her eating at her station. She wasn’t that far gone yet.

The doors remained stuck open, like something was parked on the weight sensor. Andy leaned over her counter and peered out the door, but it was a dark night and the front lights must have gone out. She cautiously pulled her purse out from under the counter. Normally she wouldn’t have kept a personal item with her on the floor, but the incident had changed everything. The rules, like Eric Clapton’s kid, had gone out the window.

Andy carefully approached the open door with her purse clutched against her chest. “Hello?” She called out to the empty night. “Welcome to MaxMart, home of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee.” The door stayed silent and open. Andy leaned out into the darkness. There was nothing there. She looked left over the black expanse of empty parking lot. Nothing. She looked right. Still nothing.

A pair of burning golden-yellow eyes suddenly lit-up right in front of her. Andy screamed and scrambled backwards as a pair of clawed hands reached for her face. Vampiric fangs glistened in the dark.

Andy wasn’t just a disciple of Max Warman, she was also a child of Oklahoma. And she reacted like any other Oklahoman would. She pulled the Smith and Wesson Model 36 out of her purse and put three .38 rounds into the vampire’s head. The bangs were deafening, even outside, and the vampire half-scrambled and half-fell away from her.

The vampire’s body hit the ground, and Andy had to force herself to start breathing again. She expected to see the vampire’s brains spilled across the pavement, but it was just lying there. Then it sat up in a smooth motion. He had some kind of energy shield around him, which was still shimmering with small electrical arcs where her bullets had hit. “That was loud,” the vampire muttered as he sat up. Andy started digging through her purse again as he loomed over her. “Oh, what are you going for now? Got a bigger gun? It’s not going to…”

Andy pepper sprayed him.

The liquid splashed over his eyes and the vampire reeled backward and fell. “Ahhh! Damn-it! That burns!” He was rolling on the ground pawing at his eyes. “Oh, that really burns! The enhanced senses just make it worse! There’s a lot of pain right now! It really hurts! I should have calibrated the shield for high-pressure liquids, because everything burns now! Someone help me!”

Andy stood over him, her revolver in one hand and the pepper spray in the other. She wasn’t going to let her store get violated again. Never again.

Something moved in her peripheral vision and Andy looked just in time to catch a blue fist in her stomach. The sudden pain made everything go blurry and it hit her again. It was like being smacked by a log. She wasn’t exactly sure what happened in the next few moments, but when she came back to awareness her weapons were on the ground and her fingers were harmlessly scratching at the demonic hand wrapped around her neck. Its grip was too tight! She couldn’t breathe!

“¡No Murdero!” The vampire choked out the words. “¡Stopo! ¡No Muerto!”

The hand released her and Andy collapsed to the ground, heaving as her body struggled to pull air past her damaged windpipe and into her aching lungs. She threw up saliva and stomach acid over the sidewalk. Some piece of the back of her mind noted that she should get a mop and a _Caution: Slippery Surface_ sign. This could ruin a customer experience if not cleaned up.

“Hey there.” The vampire grabbed her chin and twisted her over so she was staring up at him. His swollen red and watery eyes bulged out like his ridged forehead. This time she had a moment to study the warped vampiric features, and she nearly heaved again. It was Bruce Banner, the customer who had died in her store. And a group of large blue demons stood behind him. Andy stared up at them, not moving except for her still ragged breathing.

“We’d like to do some shopping,” Banner said. “Maybe you could help?”

***

Andy huddled against the display case, trying not to be noticed. Banner had an army of those demons, and they tended to start circling her like sharks if she left her back exposed. He’d barked at a few of them to back off while she’d been leading him around the store, but now Banner was focused on his machine and the demons were getting a little closer and eyeing her like Marlon Brando eyeing a corn dog.

Andy had led Banner on a kind of scavenger hunt: lawnmower motors, PVC tubing, Chinese-manufactured plastic toys, bungee cords, bleach, ammonium-based cleaners, every banana in the store, duct tape, a shower head, and a whole bunch of those suction cups you use to hang things off glass. Andy recognized what he was building when he was half-way through the device, then she’d pointed out that they had industrial-strength centrifuges in aisle 39. Banner had cursed and knocked over his half-constructed device, then had a couple of the demons haul two of the industrial centrifuges to the open space they’d cleared around the lawn furniture section.

“It’s surprisingly simple,” Banner explained as he hooked together the final pieces. “The first centrifuge will extract the Beryllium from the toxic paint in the Chinese toys, while the second extracts the Potasium-40 from the bananas. The bleach and ammonium will accelerate the Potasium-40 decay, producing the gamma radiation, which we’ll combine with the Beryllium. Keep everything balanced, and the energy just keeps building. Pretty soon we’ll reach critical. Then boom.”

“No more MaxMart?” Andy asked, her voice shaking.

“No more Earth.” Banner said without looking back.

It sounded like the kind of junk science Andy’s sister used to be into, but Banner spoke with the conviction of a man who knew what he was doing.

A loud sound of shattering glass made her and Banner jump, and Andy spun around. A bright orange car had smashed through the entrance and sent the sliding doors skipping across a row of carts. Despite the lack of anything that could be used as a ramp, the car somehow managed to launch itself into the air and soar over the checkout counters. Andy winced as it landed on a jewelry display, sending faux-precious stones flying.

The demons screamed and charged the car as it crashed through the purses and leather goods. Banner was pointing and yelling orders, and for a moment no one was paying attention to Andy. She ran.

***

Faith leaned out the window. Like a teenager’s first hand job, this was going to be quick and messy. She grabbed a Sister of Jhe as the car darted by, slammed its head into a passing mannequin, and then snapped its neck while it was still stunned. She leaned back into the car as they rounded men’s shoes. More and more of the demons were chasing their car, and the pack kept growing. There must have been over a hundred of these girls. It was like a prison riot in here, but without the fun. “Keep us moving!”

“There’s not a lot of space in here!” Candy yanked on the wheel and The General Lee’s tires squealed as it took out a display with some nice women’s shoes.

A half-dozen demons emerged from children’s shoes, directly in front of them.

“Go around them!” Faith yelled, but The General Lee had other ideas and slammed into the horde. One of the demons got trapped under a wheel and went down like it was prom night, but four others managed to latch their claws onto the car. One of them stretched its claws through the open window towards Faith. She grabbed its arm and broke it against the windowsill. She punched the demon as it screamed, but these girls were tough and it still managed to hang on.

“I’m going to try and lose them in baby supplies!” Candy shouted as she twisted them into a spin.

One of the demons tried crawling through the driver’s window, and Faith had to lean across Candi to knock it off the car. Unfortunately, that left her back exposed, and another one grabbed Faith around the waist and hauled her out the passenger window.

It slammed her back against the roof of the speeding car. The demon was kneeling above her, and Faith had to grab its free hand to keep those claws away from her throat. The car side swiped an aisle shelf and disposable diapers rained over them like giant snowflakes in a blizzard. It tried tearing at her throat with its teeth, and Faith had to yank it back by grabbing one of its big handle-bar ears. They wrestled like that for a moment, then Faith managed to twist the demon to the side and ram its head between the bars of a passing crib. The demon’s neck snapped and its body fell away.

“Gonna need a safety recall on those,” Faith muttered.

Two more were still on the car. One hanging onto the rear bumper, and another was about to claw her face off. Faith grabbed the demon’s hand, but the strike’s force was still enough to dislodge her from her precarious perch. She dragged the demon down with her, and they both fell off the car and into the third demon. All three of them hit the linoleum hard.

One of the demons managed to land partially on her feet, and Faith rewarded her dexterity by slamming a fist into her knee and snapping the joint. The remaining demon tried to tackle Faith, but got kicked into a set of breast pumps instead.

Faith flipped onto her feet as the General Lee skidded to a stop thirty feet away. “No! Keep moving!” Faith yelled as more demons rounded the corner. Candi was staring back Faith, her lips pressed tight together. “Go!” Faith yelled. Candi looked back for one more moment, then the car shot down the aisle and took a hard left in front of the registers.

In a single leap Faith jumped to the top of the aisle’s shelf. She took in everything she needed to know in a quick glance. This store was infested with the Sisterhood of Jhe. They were everywhere. And another group of the demons were just a few seconds away. They were too much for hand-to-hand. She was going to need some weapons, which meant one thing—sporting goods. But first she was going to have to make it through men’s wear, frozen foods and children’s toys. And there were a lot of demons between here and there.

Some people viewed Faith as a brawler who’d punch her way through any problem, but that wasn’t always true. Faith was capable of stealth and subtlety when necessary. One time, in prison, she’d kept a toothbrush hidden up her butt for three days. She had hidden depths. So Faith jumped into the next aisle, crouched down low and silently started to make her way forward.

***

Andy didn’t know what was happening or where she was going. She just knew that she needed to get away from Bruce Banner. Her eyes were stinging, and when she rubbed them her hand came away wet with tears. She rubbed the dampness away on her shirt and sniffled. It wasn’t fair. These people had already broken her store’s soul, and now they were destroying its body. Why was this happening to her?

Andy rounded a corner in housewares and froze. One of the demons was standing there, curiously studying a set of matching duck-themed soap dispensers. It hadn’t seen her yet. Andy took a careful step backwards, but her heel scraped against the bottom of a shelf. Crap.

The demon looked up at her and smiled with a set of razor teeth. Andy turned to run, but the demon leapt and grabbed her before she’d managed to take a single step. One of its hands wrapped itself in her hair and pulled her head back to expose her neck while the other hand rose upwards, its sharp nails glistening in the florescent lights.

And then the demon was yanked off her and Andy fell. There was a cracking sound and the demon’s lifeless body landed next to her. Andy scrambled back and looked up. Drusilla stood there in her human face, and she was dressed in the same brown and white MaxMart uniform that Andy was wearing, apron and all. Her hair was tied up in a neat bun and her makeup was done in perfect MaxMart regulation style.

“I’d like to apply for a job, please,” Drusilla said as she nervously held out a filled-in employment application.

Andy glanced back and forth between the dead demon and Drusilla for a moment, then rose to her feet. The vampire was just standing there, the application held out towards Andy. She cautiously took it and looked at the page:

**Name:**  
Drusilla  
**Address:**  
The pauper’s chariot  
**Phone Number:**  
buzz buzz buzz says you  
**Email Address:**  
dru1860@yahoo.com

**What position are you applying for?**  
I read the books about  
**What shifts are you available for?**  
the cakes and the pixies and  
**Have you been employed at MaxMart before?**  
there will be no more  
**Have you previously worked retail?**  
burning screaming flies.  
**Do you have a reliable form of transportation?**  
Night-shift only.

**Please list any relevant experience.**  
Tigers, icicles, Chinese People, UNIX and C++.

“You want to work here?” Andy asked.

“I read all of the books,” Drusilla gushed. “I read them over and over and it was perfect like the second little piggy. I know the dress numbers and the stockings on the cans and everything. Please? I promise to be good. I’ll never be naughty again. It’s so perfect and I want to do the Maximum Low Price Guarantee.”

“Do you have the books?” Andy asked. “Did you bring back the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_?”

“Do I have the job?” Drusilla preened like a little girl asking for cookies.

Normally Andy would have had to go through her manager, but if this situation didn’t qualify for emergency powers under Section 33.2.4.8, then nothing would. “You’re hired. $7.25 an hour. And our benefits package is a guy named Larry who’ll help you fill out a food stamps and Medicaid application.”

“Yeah for biscuits!” Drusilla cheered.

“Congratulations,” Andy continued. “You’ve joined an elite retail outlet—the best of the best. Carry yourself with pride. You are now part of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee.”

Drusilla saluted her.

“Now where is the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_? We need to save this store.”

Drusilla led Andy around to the next aisle where a cart waited with thirteen black binders. Andy’s breath caught in her throat, and she choked back a joyous sob. They were saved. Bruce Banner and his army of demons didn’t matter anymore. Her store was back.

She reached into the cart and pulled out a random binder, trusting in her ability to always open the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_ to the relevant page for any situation. The binder fell open and both Andy and Drusilla leaned over the book as they read. They looked up at each other and spoke at the same time. “Paint Supplies.”

***

Faith flattened herself against the dress shirts and waited for the patrol to pass by. Candi and The General Lee were still attracting most of the attention on the other end of the store, but there was still plenty of the Sisterhood over here. She had to play it careful. These girls were strong, fast and had claws that could tear apart her insides faster than a five-course meal at Taco Bell (or at least before Faith had received her lifetime ban from all Taco Bells). One wrong move and she’d be so dead that Buffy would start sleeping with her.

She was nearly through men’s wear, but there was a block of open space between the Levis and the safety of frozen foods. She’d been waiting here for a couple minutes, hoping for a moment when she could dart across without being spotted, but there were just too many demons and no opportunities. She could have detoured through books, but that would leave her with little cover and her ass would be vulnerable to assaults from electronics. No, the only way was through this open space, and that meant more fighting.

Faith waited until a group of the demons had their backs turned, then started creeping towards them with a men’s leather belt looped between her hands. The rear demon was just starting to turn when Faith pounced. She leapt onto its back, dropped the belt over its neck and pulled it tight. The demon screeched, dull and raspy as it struggled to breathe. Faith stepped back as its allies turned to face her. She yanked the demon down by pulling on the end of the belt, then pivoted and spun, using the belt as a lever to send the choking demon plowing into its friends like a bowling ball. The entire group went down and Faith darted past them.

They were back on their feet after a second, their howls attracting more demons from across the store. But Faith’s sprint had taken her to the safety of frozen foods, where the narrow aisles would keep them from ganging up on her. She kicked open a glass freezer door as the first demon charged her, and it got a face full of sharp broken glass as it crashed through it. She caught the next demon with a pack of Choco Tacos, then leapt on top of the refrigerators and rolled into the next aisle.

And she realized that was a mistake as her feet touched down. This aisle was much wider than the others, with low open-top freezers down the center containing assorted meats. That meant a lot of room for a lot of demons, and those lot of demons were pouring into the aisle.

Faith caught the first one that reached her with a quick one-two body blow that stunned it, but the weight of the horde behind it still crashed into her, and she went down under a tangle of bodies. They pressed down and onto her from all sides, and Faith had to use all of her strength just to keep the horde from crushing her. The confusion of the situation was the only thing that was keeping Faith alive. Most of the demons didn’t seem to realize she was at the bottom of the pile where she’d be vulnerable to their razor-sharp claws.

Most other slayers wouldn’t have made it out of there alive, but this wasn’t Faith’s first gangbang, and she knew how to handle a crowd. She heaved up, which shifted everyone just enough to give her space to bring her knees up to her chest. When the pile started to shift back down Faith kicked out with all of her slayer strength. The pile of demons flipped like a flapjack, and Faith went sliding away.

Her head cracked against a freezer, but Faith was running on adrenaline and she barely felt it. She was up while the demons were still trying to untangle themselves. She grabbed the meat freezer, broke two of the bolts that secured it to the floor with a single yank, then tilted it down toward the pile of demons.

The heavy freezer tilted up and hung there for a moment on its last two bolts. Its door fell open and sausages shot onto the demons like little polish missiles that detonated with delicious meatsplosions. Then the bacon shifted and the freezer finally fell. It hit hard, crushing the demons under the weight of honey-baked hams and smoked pork ribs. “Hopefully none of you girls were Jewish.”

Faith now had a clear shot out of frozen foods and into kid’s toys. Just a few more aisles after that and she’d be in the land of baseball bats, hunting bows, pool cues and survival knives. She started to take a step away, but something wrapped around her ankle. It was one of the demons. Its spine had been crushed by hundreds of pounds of frozen meats, but it still had enough life left to rasp a few words at her. “La Mama Bell Grande.”

“What the hell,” Faith muttered as she kicked the hand away. She rounded the corner that separated frozen foods from toys and nearly ran straight into the biggest demon she’d ever seen. It vaguely looked like the other sisters, but must have weighed several tons. It stood a head and shoulders above the aisle. Large metal plates had been welded onto its body in place of clothes. “So you’d be Mama Bell Grande I’d assume. Don’t supposed you’d be one of those big ones that’s slow and easily avoided?”

Faith didn’t even get a chance to dodge. The vicious backhand caught her upside the head and sent her crashing through three aisles. A pile of toys rained down on her as she landed. Faith had been hit so hard she got momentary dyslexia, which meant she had to dick a pile of boys off her prone body (and not for the first time). She barely managed to climb back to her feet, then had to dive to the side as Mama Bell Grande came crashing through the aisles after her.


	5. Hulk vs. The Homosexual Agenda

Welcome back, loyal readers! It’s so wonderful to see everyone again. My name is Andrew Wells. You may know me from my frequent postings on Dragon Ball Z message boards, or my leadership role in pro-Emilio Estevez activism. Due to an unfortunate lack of consistent updates, our fanfic author has asked me to do a recap page for you handsome and/or beautiful readers.

The hero of our tale is the alliterative and feisty ferocious femme fatale, Faith. She's the truest of the true. A warrior with steel in her veins and fire in her heart. She’s what you’d get if Bhodi (Patrick Swayze’s character from _Point Break_) had a love child with Darth Vader, the original Starbuck and another Bhodi. Someone should write a fanfic about that!

When we last left our fully-functional fickle fighter, she’d just failed an initiative check against Mama Belle Grande and took an extra 6d6 sneak attack damage. If only she’d listened to me and taken two levels of Barbarian, then she’d have Uncanny Dodge and would be immune to losing her dexterity bonus when flat-footed. She’s most certainly regretting beating me about the head with my 3.5 Player’s Handbook now. Most certainly.

The villain of our tale is Bruce Banner. This obviously isn’t a classic Bruce Banner tale from Stan Lee. This is an evil Bruce Banner, like from Jason Aaron’s _Incredible Hulk, Volume 3, Issue 5_—that’s the one with the gamma monkey. Isn’t Jason Aaron cool? I liked the part of _Thor: God of Thunder Issue 11_ where Thor destroyed the godbomb by hitting it with two Mjölnirs. That was awesome. I wanted to read Jason Aaron’s _Scalped_, but there were bad words and drawings of naked people, which Xander said wasn't good for me. He took them away and locked them in his room.

Now Bruce Banner is building a gamma bomb that can destroy the world. And he’s being helped by the Sisterhood of Jhe, who you may remember as Xander’s arch-nemeses. The Sisterhood once teamed up with Sunnydale’s mutant swim team to blow up Sunnydale High by putting a bomb in the basement. But Xander went undercover in the swim team to learn of the Sisterhood’s dastardly plan. Then there was a freeway chase where Xander was driving his uncle’s car, but a semi-truck overturned and spilled liquid nitrogen on the Sisterhood and Xander said “Hasta La Vista, baby” before shooting them and they exploded. He truly is the heart of the team.

Also opposing Bruce Banner is his personal Mr. Hyde, The Incredible Hulk. Somehow (and I honestly don’t believe our author has seriously worked through the logistics of this) The Hulk remained alive after Bruce Banner was turned into a vampire. Like a Sith Lord, Banner has learned to harness his vampiric hate to keep the Hulk contained. Is anyone else excited about the new Star Wars sequels? I wonder if Boba Fett will be in them. People frequently ask me: “Andrew, who would win in a fight, Boba Fett or Batman?” I want to say Batman would win, but then I remember that underestimating Boba Fett is a fatal mistake that you can only make once, so I say that Boba Fett would win instead.

Rounding out our cast of characters is Candi, a physicist whose brilliant mind may be our hero’s only hope for salvation. It’s very important to remember that Candi has spent this entire story clad only in sexy lingerie. Our other wildcards are Drusilla, the mother of all vampires, and Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States. He moved on from American tragedies such as the Trail of Tears and Florida to become night clerk at the MaxMart.

I hope this recap page has cleared up any confusion. Now, let’s tune into Drusilla and President Andrew Jackson as they confront Bruce Banner.

***

“Hello, mother.” Banner sneered. “Is this what I have to do to get your attention? Destroy the world?”

“A marvelous idea,” Drusilla gushed. “Let’s burn the bright nasty world down. But you must leave the MaxMart. We have low prices.”

Banner’s eyes narrowed as he glared at Drusilla, and Andy was glad that he wasn’t paying her any attention. Those inhuman eyes were a reminder that she’d fundamentally misunderstood humanity’s place on the food chain. Bruce Banner was stronger than her. He was faster. He could tear her arms off and suck out her blood. He had an energy shield that could block bullets and a bomb that could destroy the world. But none of that mattered, because Andy had the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_. The omniscient three-ring binders were written by Max Warman, the legendary founder of MaxMart, and contained instructions for dealing with any situation—including world destroying vampires with energy shields.

“My poor little David,” Drusilla cooed. “Still confused like a little babe. Mommy and the Maximum Low Price Guarantee will make it better.”

“Bruce! My name is Bruce! And I’ve been awake for three days! You’ve just been ignoring me and reading those stupid MaxMart binders instead of teaching me how to be a vampire. You abandoned me to this world!”

“_Ahem_,” Andy cleared her throat. They weren’t here to argue with Banner. She and Drusilla had a job to do.

“I didn’t do that,” Drusilla said, her voice soft and modest. “I don’t think I’d do something like that. Maybe I forgot?”

“You don’t remember? This is why you can’t trust women. A woman can’t feel real love, not like a man does. You might hold her interest for a little while, but if something shiny comes along then **BAM!**, you get dropped like a used tampon. One minute you’re engaged and planning to spend your life with a pretty little thing, and the next minute she’s a giant green gamma harpy! And the harpy isn’t even a metaphor!”

“Excuse me,” Andy said more forcefully. They both continued to ignore her.

“Hush now,” Drusilla said to Banner, her voice growing sterner. “Bunnies don’t get to bite wolves.”

Banner growled as his fingers tightened into fists. He took a step towards Drusilla.

“Pay attention to me!” Andy shouted. Both of them froze and looked at her. “Drusilla, don’t you have a job to do?”

“Oh yes!” Drusilla smiled at Banner. “Your mother is a working girl now.” She grabbed a one-gallon bucket of paint from the shelf and loaded it onto a belt. That belt fed into a car-engine sized device on rollers. Tubes twisted around it, connecting various drums and pumps. A hose snaked out of the device into a specialized gun that Andy held, with a nozzle large enough to shoot a baseball. Drusilla loaded more paint cans as Andy spoke.

“This is the BFPG 4010. It uses technology designed to launch rockets into orbit to apply paint onto walls. It ruined the sport of competitive speed painting. This knob uses barns/second for units. Understand that we are in the state of Oklahoma, a place where gun laws are so lax that we lead the nation in hand grenades sold from vending machines. And yet the Oklahoma Legislature so heavily regulates this device that it requires a background check, a two week waiting period, and an up-to-date will before it can be sold. It is explicitly illegal to use one of these for grizzly bear hunting; it’s not considered sporting.”

“It’s just a paint gun,” Banner said.

“And your personal shield doesn’t work against pressurized liquids,” Andy said as she squeezed the trigger. The BFPG 4010 jolted her whole body and she staggered back as a wall of rainbow death erupted from the gun. Everything in front of Andy was washed away in a biblical flood of color. It was a prismatic orgy, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the 60s. Andy just kept her finger on the trigger. Colors mixed in ways gods never intended: Tideland Pearl and Misty Rose, Harvest Yellow and African Violet. She couldn’t look directly into the spray, which would be like having liquid rainbows injected directly into her eyes. But she knew the waves of colors were demolishing everything, like a Care Bear execution squad purging a village of dissidents. Empty paint cans rained from the BFPG 4010 like spent shell casings from a machine gun. Drusilla was using her vampiric speed to keep the belt fed with fresh paint cans. The back wall flickered at fourteen colors per second.

Banner had disappeared in the first seconds of the initial spray. There were sounds that might have been his screams, or they might have just been the roar of the BFPG 4010 echoing across the store. Andy just hung on with everything she had as the vibrations shook her body. She clenched her teeth so she wouldn’t bite her tongue and kept her finger on the trigger. The screaming sound was getting louder, and it grew into a tremendous roar.

A shockwave suddenly hit her, powerful enough to shatter the tanks on the BFPG 4010 and knock her and Drusilla to the ground. A misty psychedelic cloud of swirling colors hung over the store, and Andy had to rub her stinging eyes as a shape emerged from the cloud. It was a rainbow-colored giant, maybe nine feet tall with huge immense muscles and miraculously intact purple pants.

“I forgot to mention,” Drusilla whispered in Andy’s ear. “He does that sometimes.”

The giant was staring at his multi-colored hands in confusion. Yellows, Reds and blues criss-crossed his body in long streaks. “Why is Hulk not Green Hulk? Hulk not Gray Hulk? Not Red Hulk? Not Blue Hulk?” He crinkled his forehead and scratched the back of his head, then seemed to come to a decision. “Hulk is Rainbow Hulk. That mean Hulk is Gay-Pride Hulk! GAY-PRIDE HULK IS STRONGEST HULK THERE IS!” He slammed two fists into the ground, bouncing Drusilla and Andy into the air.

The gay giant took a step towards them as he growled, and Andy suddenly became homophobic. She tried scooting back, but her feet didn’t find traction on the slippery floor.

A pack of demons turned a corner, drawn by the noise. Gay-Pride Hulk’s gaze turned away from Andy and Drusilla and locked onto them. “¡Árriba, árriba! ¡Andale, andale!” the lead demon cried as they charged. They leapt onto Gay-Pride Hulk, their claws and teeth tearing at his skin like a swarm of piranhas.

“GAY-PRIDE HULK IMMUNE TO FEMININE WILES!” He roared like a bear as he shook most of them off. They leapt back onto him, some getting swatted away by his massive fists. Gay-Pride Hulk’s pants stretched tight as he fought the Sisterhood of Jhe, perfectly outlining his bulging muscles.

One of the demons fell near Andy and Drusilla, then looked up at the two of them and bared its teeth. Drusilla’s strong arms wrapped around Andy and yanked her away as the demon lunged. And then they were running down the aisle hand-in-hand, Drusilla dragging Andy behind her as the demon gave chase.

Two more Sisters of Jhe rounded a corner in front of them. Andy and Drusilla tried to turn in opposite directions as they ran, smashed into each other and tumbled to the ground. Andy flinched and covered her head as a demon dove towards them.

A gunshot sounded from behind Andy and the demon dropped dead with a bullet hole in her forehead. Two more evenly paced cracks followed, and the remaining two demons also fell.

Andy instinctively scrambled away from the gunshots as she turned around. She gasped. It was the ghost of Max Warman, founder of MaxMart and the Maximum Low Price Guarantee. His mustache was perfect, waxed and curved up like a pair of tusks. His famous Remington Rifle was still pointed down the aisle, and his Calvary Officer’s Stetson was perched perfectly on his head.

The top two buttons on Andy’s blouse popped open on their own accord. A seam in Drusilla’s skirt split, revealing the top of her smooth pale thigh.

“Well done, ladies,” Max Warman said. “Your heroic actions in defense of the Maximum Low Price Guarantee have brought me back. Now answer quickly. What is the state of MaxMart’s enemies?”

“There’s demons,” Drusilla said. “And a gay Hulk, and a bomb, and we’re low on scented hand soaps.”

“Control your hysterias, woman,” Max Warman said. “We’ll get to the details latter. What of MaxMart’s true enemies?”

Andy swallowed hard, then had to clear her throat before she could speak. She’d known of the MaxMart’s enemies since she was eight years old. “The Roosevelt’s are gone, Mr. Warman, sir. There hasn’t been a Roosevelt in the White House since FDR died.”

“Spectacular. If only I’d lived long enough to personally drive a stake into that cripple’s black heart.” Max Warman spat on the ground. “Now what of inflation?”

“Averaging just under 2% a year,” Andy said.

“Unacceptable,” Max Warman said as he reloaded his Remington. “I killed inflation at the Battle of Wichita in ‘29. I invented the Maximum Low Price Guarantee to make sure she stayed dead. Yet that slippery old lady managed to survive. We’ll see about taking care of her after we deal with the demons. And what of MaxMart’s final foe?”

A third foe? Andy tried to think back through everything she’d read about Max Warman. She thought she knew everything about Max Warman and his battles through the 1920s and 1930s, but she just remembered two foes. Who was the MaxMart’s third foe?

“The micks, woman. What’s happened to all the micks?”

Andy hesitated before speaking. “I… I don’t know what a mick is.”

“Wiped out the whole race then? Probably for the best.”

“I helped with that,” Drusilla said.

“Well done, young lady.” He cocked his gun. “Now, let’s see about cleaning out this store.”

***

This was Faith’s toughest fight since her battle against genital herpes. She’d hit Mama Bell Grande with everything she had. The two of them had torn through sporting goods, and Faith had broken baseball bats, golf clubs and hunting knives against Mama Bell Grande’s invulnerable hide. She’d even tried an ancient and forbidden move, taught to her by a Shaolin Monk on the top of Mount Song. It was supposed to be unbeatable and able to kill anything. They called it the ‘Dick Cheney’, and it involved shooting your enemy in the face with a shotgun. And Mama Belle Grande had survived it all. Nothing had hurt her, and she was tossing Faith around like a salad (which fortunately wasn’t a prison reference).

Faith went crashing backwards through her fifth aisle and smacked into the ground. She closed her eyes and took a brief moment to catch her breath. Her whole body was aching, and every time Mama Belle Grande landed another blow she was a little slower to rise. She couldn’t keep doing this. She had to change the game.

Mama Belle Grande was charging again. Faith leapt back onto her feet and started running. Mama Belle Grande was faster, but Faith could take tighter corners. She took a hard right into hardware as Mama Belle Grande charged past her.

Faith ducked her head down so it was beneath the aisle, then took two more quick turns. Mama Belle Grande had already U-Turned and was crashing through aisles behind her, searching for Faith and screaming with her throaty growl.

Faith paused when she got to paint supplies. Someone had stripped this aisle bare, leaving it broken and used, like a new inmate after her first group shower. Odd. She kept moving, ducking past three more aisles and into power tools. She took a moment and looked around. A wide selection of table saws, drills and electric sanders were laid out before her. These wouldn’t help. Faith started pawing through the assorted boxes when some whisper in the back of her mind told her to turn around. She did so slowly, then smiled. Light gleamed off a four-foot long blade wrapped in a serrated chain. It was perfect. The box called it the “Atom Splitter”, and there were warnings about something called “Spontaneous Fission,” which was a word Faith didn’t know. Faith carefully pulled the chainsaw from the box and yanked on the starter cord. The store lights flickered as it sprang to life, and Faith’s smile grew wider.

Mama Bell Grande roared as she spotted Faith from the other side of hardware. Faith lowered the chainsaw into an en garde position and waited. Mama Bell Grande plowed through shelves like a fat man running hurdles as she charged Faith.

Faith ducked under Mama Bell Grande’s first swing and came up inside her reach. The chainsaw tore into one of the metal plates welded to Mama Bell Grande’s torso. Burning sparks splashed against Faith’s face as the Atom Splitter sliced a deep gouge through the metal and the demon’s side. Mama Bell Grande screamed and tried to drop an elbow into Faith’s head. Faith ducked and spun back out of her reach.

Faith kept backing out of Mama Bell Grande’s reach, keeping the chainsaw between them. This time Mama Bell Grande didn’t charge, but glared cautiously at the retreating slayer. She kept her injured side away from Faith and held her arms up, either one ready to smash into Faith if the slayer tried to bring the chainsaw any closer.

“Come on,” Faith revved the Atom Splitter. “Give us a kiss.”

Mama Belle Grande grabbed a shelving unit filled with hand tools and chucked it at her. Faith was too slow to dodge. Hammers hammered into her and The Atom Splitter spun out of Faith’s hands. Faith kicked the shelf aside and leapt up as fast as she could, but Mama Belle Grande was already on her. One of those huge hands wrapped itself around Faith’s torso and started to squeeze.

Faith’s head filled with blood as the intense pressure made her scream. Cracking sounds came from her ribs. She fruitlessly kicked at the arm that held her. She couldn’t breathe! Mama Bell Grande just grinned, her sharpened teeth gleaming like daggers.

A raging homosexual came from nowhere and slammed into Mama Bell Grande. Faith fell out of her grip and landed on her knees.

“GAY-PRIDE HULK SMASH THE MATRAIRCHY!” The multi-colored beast screamed as he hit Mama Bell Grande so hard that physics temporarily broke. The scene of Gay-Pride Hulk hitting her had to rewind and replay in slow motion two more times as time tried to get back to its feet and start flowing normal again.

Mama Bell Grande went down hard. But she didn’t stay down. A kick to Gay-Pride Hulk’s knee gave her some space and she was up again in under a second. A knee hit Gay-Pride Hulk’s torso and he curled around it. One of her clawed hands dug into Gay-Pride Hulk’s stomach, spilling his deep-green blood across the floor. Her other hand clawed at his neck, but Gay-Pride Hulk caught it and twisted it away.

They stayed like that for a moment, each one wrestling for the upper hand. Faith scooped up the Atom Smasher and pulled the starter cord.

Gay-Pride Hulk saw what Faith was doing and spun Mama Bell Grande around. The claw that had been in his stomach tore out the side of his torso, spilling more blood, but Gay-Pride Hulk ignored the injury and pulled Mama Bell Grande into a wrestler’s hold that pinned her arms. They were both turned to face Faith, with Mama Belle Grande’s back pinned to Gay-Pride Hulk’s front. Faith revved the Atom Splitter and dove into Mama Belle Grande.

Even allowing for subjective variances in human sexuality, the fact that Faith got a raging lady boner from sawing her way through Mama Bell Grande was not a healthy thing. But she couldn’t help it. This demon had been knocking her around and she’d built up a lot of tension and emotions that needed to be vented. And then there were body fluids everywhere, which Faith’s mind associated with things going right. Plus there were vibrations. Lots and lots of good vibrations.

It took a few minutes before Mama Bell Grande’s various parts finally stopped moving. Faith released the Atom Smasher’s trigger, but the machine kept purring along on pent-up energy. Faith set it down and leaned against a shelf, trying to get her own breathing and heartbeat under control. Killing Mama Bell Grande had been a long and slow ride, which ended with more whimpers than bangs. She looked up at Gay-Pride Hulk and the two of them both eyed each other for a long moment, then they simultaneously sighed and turned away in disappointment

“There’s a bomb around here somewhere,” Faith said. “We should probably take care of that.”

“Yes. Gay-Pride Hulk need smashing time.”

****

A final crack of gunfire echoed across the store as the last Sister of Jhe dropped dead.

Andy hugged her sweaty body to Max Warman’s leg, clutching to it like a barbarian’s groupie. Her arms were wrapped along his muscular thigh, hands reaching longingly upward towards Max Warman’s crotch. Most of her clothes had been torn during battle with the Sisterhood, and only a few well-placed scraps were preserving her modesty. Drusilla had similarly draped herself along Max Warman’s other leg.

This was the most perfect moment of Andy’s life. She was with the ghost of Max Warman. He had been dead since 1939, but now he was back to save her. And he let her drape herself across his leg. She was touching him! Andy’s sister had given her a hard time for leaving her virginity for a man dead seventy years, but look who was being the moron now. Andy wished this moment could last forever.

“There’s a lesson here,” Max Warman said as he stared at the pile of demon bodies. “Physical strength and savagery cannot triumph against a disciplined hand. Culture, good breeding, and a white heart will always prevail against the demons of the underworlds. It’s like I’ve always said about the coons.”

Andy scratched the back of her head. Why was he talking about racoons? Max Warman had been using a lot of words she didn’t know as he killed the demons, referring to them as paddies, kikes, chinks, krauts, and left-footers. She thought that maybe she remembered her grandmother using some of those words.

The sound of echoing footsteps made Andy look up, and Gay-Pride Hulk and a beautiful brunette came around the corner. The woman was dressed in a torn leather body suit and walked with a purposeful and powerful stride. Gay-Pride Hulk followed with a hip-swaying smashing prance.

“Welcome, young lady,” Max was hungrily looking her up and down, though Andy didn’t care. There was more than enough Max Warman for all of them to share. “That’s quite the savage you have.”

“Name’s Faith,” she said as she walked up and stopped in front of him. “That’s Gay-Pride Hulk. Don’t fuck with him.”

Max’s eyes stayed glued to the woman’s chest for several long seconds. Then he looked down at Andy and Drusilla, who each continued to hug his legs before glancing back up at Faith. “I have a third leg, if you’d like to join in.” He winked suggestively.

Faith killed the ghost with a head-butt, and Andy screamed as Max Warman faded away.

“Ahhh. Gay-Pride Hulk wanted third leg.”

Drusilla jumped to her feet and swung at Faith, but got knocked back down with a single punch.

“Where’s the bomb?” Faith slammed her boot down onto Drusilla’s chest, pinning the vampire to the ground. Drusilla growled at her, but Faith pushed down harder.

Andy was shaking her head in disbelief. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t be gone. Andy jumped up and tried to claw at Faith, but the other girl casually shoved her aside without looking up.

“Let’s be honest here,” Faith said to Drusilla. “I’m going to be slaying you. No ifs, ands or buts. But maybe I’ll be spending the next few minutes dealing with that bomb instead of dealing with you. So just point me in the right direction, and you get a few more minutes to live.”

Drusilla hissed like a snake.

“Gamma Bomb,” Gay-Pride Hulk muttered.

“What?” Faith looked up at him.

“Banner build Gamma Bomb. Gay-Pride Hulk can feel it. This way.” Gay-Pride Hulk sashayed away, moving quickly for someone of his size. Faith glanced back and forth between Drusilla and Gay-Pride Hulk a few times, then went after him.

Andy and Drusilla crawled to their feet, leaning on each other. “He’s gone,” Andy’s voice cracked as she tried to find words. “He was here, and now he’s gone.”

“He was perfect,” Drusilla was crying. “Like toads and babies dancing the waltz. Like all the times I wasn’t lit on fire.”

Andy paused for a moment to suck back the tears and dry her eyes. “On the other hand, I think he was horribly racist. They left that part out of the biographies.”

Drusilla nodded. “Those were very bad naughty words. Sometimes Ms. Edith said horrible violent things about colored people. I’d tell her that I’d fetch my slippers and put her over my knee. We were evil, not evil evil evil. The colored people were always my favorite; they’re so sweet.”

“I think it’s racist to have a favorite,” Andy said.

“Oh,” Drusilla hung her head in shame. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Don’t worry,” Andy patted Drusilla on the shoulder. “We have training videos for that. They’ll teach you about not being racist.”

“Really?” Drusilla grabbed Andy’s hands and jumped up and down a couple times. “This is the most wonderful store ever! Let’s hurry and save it! Then I can learn how not to be racist!”

Drusilla’s enthusiasm was infectious, and Andy smiled. The two of them raced after Faith and Gay-Pride Hulk.

***

Like Helen Keller at an orgy, Faith had no idea what had just splashed on her face. The bomb was shaking itself apart. There were parts that pulsated, parts that banged together, and a whole bunch of parts that kind of looked like penises. At the center was a glowing ball of energy about the size of a basketball. Tubes ran from the penis-things into the energy ball, which was slowly growing and pulsating. The bomb was shaking itself apart as the energy ball grew, spewing strange liquids and parts. “Any ideas, big boy?”

“Gay-Pride Hulk is strangely turned on.”

“Me too, but we still gotta find a way to stop this thing,” Faith said as she started paced around it.

“Smash penis parts?” Gay-Pride Hulk asked.

“Sounds like a plan,” Faith said as she kicked off the first penis part. Gay-Pride Hulk knocked another four off the bomb with a single swipe. He kept moving around the bomb and tearing off more penis things. Faith was impressed. She could manage one or two at once, but Gay-Pride Hulk was handling them five or six at a time.

Between the two of them they had the last one ripped off the bomb within a minute. Faith and Gay-Pride Hulk stopped to admire their handiwork. The energy ball was still growing and the bomb was still violently shaking.

“Any other ideas, big boy?” Faith asked.

“Wait a minute!” Andy shouted as she and Drusilla came running down the aisle towards them. Andy was holding an open binder and Drusilla was pushing a cart full of other binders.

Faith eyed the approaching vampire. If only she had a stake. She didn’t know anything about disarming bombs. It was tempting to just assume the bomb problem would take care of itself and she could focus on killing a vampire.

“I know what to do,” Andy said as she set the open binder in front of Faith. The title on the page said _Section 8.37.101.4 - Safety Guidelines for Gamma Bomb Emergencies Program (SAGEGEP)_. Faith took the binder from Andy and flipped past a couple pages on Personal Protective Equipment and Safety Planning to a diagram on disarming the bomb.

“Right there,” Andy pressed her finger against the page. “We need to drain the gamma energy into all these control rods.”

Faith looked between the diagram and the bomb. “I don’t see any control rods.”

Andy took the binder back from Faith and started walking around the bomb. “I don’t understand. There should be control rods all around here. This is the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_. It’s never wrong.”

“Not even once,” Drusilla agreed.

Faith shrugged. “Well, it’s wrong now. Any other ideas? Anyone here a scientist?”

The General Lee came screeching around the corner, its tires smoking as it slid across the floor. It shot towards them, did an unnecessary jump over a small overturned shelf, then braked at the last second to stop just in front of the bomb. Candi climbed out of the driver’s window, her black lingerie failing to stop her curves from swaying as she moved. “I’m a scientist!” The blonde said.

“What are _you_ doing here,” Andy hissed at Candi. “We don’t need your help. We have the _MaxMart Employee Rules and Regulations_.”

“Oh please,” Candi said as she started walking around the bomb. “You don’t know anything about anything that’s not retail.”

“You two know each other?” Faith asked.

“We’re sisters,” Candi said as she knelt down and inspected a tube.

“Such devoted sisters,” Drusilla said as she clapped her hands together.

“No,” Andy said. “She’s a slut.”

“And she’s the crazy one,” Candi said. “We need to drain the gamma energy into the control rods. But something’s wrong. I don’t see any control rods here. There should be a bunch. They should be five or six inches long, with a little bulb at the end. Kind of like penises.”

“Okay, people,” Faith said. “Let’s just move on from the control rods. There are no control rods here. Let’s look for other solutions. Maybe we should start running?”

“I don’t think there’s any place we could run,” Candi said. “If my calculations are correct, this thing could destroy the world.”

“I’ve got it!” Drusilla said suddenly.

Everyone looked up at her.

“One time Angelus pulled a sword from Acathla and the whole world was sucked into hell. That was like destroying the world.”

“First off,” Faith said, “that’s not actually helpful. Second, Angel didn’t actually manage to do it. Buffy stopped him and we’re not in hell. Third, we’re looking for ideas on how to save the world, not destroy it.”

“Sorry,” Drusilla said. “I got confused.”

“There may be an idea there,” Andy said. “If we could create enough suction inside the gamma plasma field, then we may be able to change its density enough to trigger a state change.”

“And that would disarm the bomb?” Faith asked.

“Disarm’s a strong word. But it might make running a viable option.”

“Gay-Pride Hulk can do it,” the rainbow-colored beast said as he stepped forward. “Gay-Pride Hulk can suck like Hoover.”

“Hoover as in the vacuum or the FBI director?” Andy asked.

“Yes,” Gay-Pride Hulk said.

“But there’s no way,” Candi said. “Even if you were strong enough, the bomb will still go off. You’d kill yourself. We need to create an immense amount of pressure around the gamma energy.”

Gay-Pride Hulk didn’t acknowledge her. He stepped over a broken-down centrifuge, put his two giant hands on either side of the energy sphere and squeezed. The energy seemed to fight him, bulging out and around his hands like he was squeezing jello. But Gay-Pride Hulk stepped in closer and wrapped his whole arm around the energy sphere, squeezing the bulging parts against his body in an all-encompassing hug. It glowed brighter and started crackling as Gay-Pride Hulk squeezed tighter, and he grunted.

“He’s doing it,” Candi mumbled. “It’s changing state.”

The energy started pulsing faster and brighter as Gay-Pride Hulk squeezed it tighter against his body. A bolt leapt from the sphere and coursed over Gay-Pride Hulk. He roared, deep and loud enough to shake the whole store, but kept squeezing the energy.

“I think someone mentioned something about running,” Andy said.

“Get in the car,” Faith said as she started backing away.

No one needed to be told twice. Andy, Candi and Drusilla all piled into the small Dodge Charger. Faith stopped for a moment and looked back. “Hey, Gay-Pride Hulk.”

He looked up at her.

“I just wanted to say that I misjudged you, and I’m sorry. When we first met, you had that whole unchained id thing going. I thought things were going to get a little rapey. But you weren’t like that, and that’s what’s cool about you.”

Gay-Pride Hulk nodded at her as they shared a moment.

“Come on!” Candi shouted from the driver’s seat.

Faith jumped in through the passenger window and crawled into the cramped back seat next to Drusilla. The General Lee shot down the aisle and took a sharp turn that caused Faith to fall across Drusilla’s lap. Dru went into game face and Faith elbowed her across the nose. Drusilla growled and wrapped a hand around Faith’s neck. Faith hammered a quick series of punches into Drusilla’s torso.

“Children!” Candi shouted. “Don’t make me pull over!”

“Sorry,” Drusilla went back to normal face and released Faith.

Faith would have been happy to keep brawling, she was an expert in maneuvering around cramped back seats, but it wasn’t going to be fun if Drusilla wasn’t going to fight back.

The General Lee smashed through the MaxMart’s doors. The bottom of the car scraped against the parking lot, kicking up sparks as it raced across the empty space. There was a duck pond on the other side of the lot, and the General Lee made a beeline for it. They crossed the space in seconds. The General Lee hit a dirt mound that was conveniently shaped like a ramp and soared into the air over the duck pond.

***

“I’m going to win,” Banner smiled as he leaned against a tipped-over shelf. He wasn’t physically present—The Hulk had control and there was no way he was getting it back for a while. But he could manifest as an apparition in Hulk’s mind. Not that it really mattered at this point. “After all these years, I’m finally going to win.”

“No. Hulk will beat you. Hulk will save world.” Hulk grunted as he struggled to contain the gamma energy. The heat had long burned away the layers of ridiculous rainbow paint. The green energy now cast long dark shadows across The Hulk’s emerald skin, highlighting his immense muscles in black and green.

Banner laughed. “Once again, you just don’t get it.”

The Hulk only grunted as he continued to squeeze the energy. Banner wouldn’t have guessed that one could convert a plasma to a solid just by squeezing hard, but he also wasn’t surprised. The stubborn oaf had a long history of doing impossible things just because he was too stupid to realize that he shouldn’t be trying. The bomb wasn’t going to destroy the world at this point. It probably wouldn’t even destroy the nearby town. But it would still be enough.

“Let me explain,” Banner said. “Being turned into a vampire didn’t change me much. The old mortal Bruce Banner lost his soul years ago. He buried it deep down and locked it away, scared of his own emotions. That Bruce Banner had been carrying around a personal demon for years.”

“No. Banner not evil before.”

“You know that’s a lie,” Banner said. “The hate has always been there, burning inside both of us. We had that in common.”

“No.”

“We both felt it. Every time we were run out of town for trying to help. Every time a pretty face turned away in fear. Every time some hero looked down on us. Every time some villain pulled us into one of their stupid schemes. Each and every god-damn time we were hunted down like animals! You felt it too. You hated them just like I did.”

“Banner wrong. Hulk only hate one thing. Hulk hate Banner.”

“Exactly!” Banner said as he jumped up. “I feel the same way, friend. Out of all of them, I hated you the most. Oh, how I dreamed about ending you. I would have killed myself years ago, but you always stopped me. If nothing else, you certainly are a survivor.”

The Hulk looked back at Banner. The gamma plasma was shedding more and more energy as waste heat. It wouldn’t be long now.

“This didn’t change much,” Banner motioned towards his vamp face. “Just a few tweaks to my morality—a willingness to go a little farther than I ever had before. I don’t really care about destroying this world. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going to shed any tears over its loss, but it’s not the point of this exercise. This bomb is here because you won’t let this world be destroyed. You’ll stand here and hug the only thing in the Universe that can kill you before you let that happen.”

“Banner die too.”

“Yes. Yes I do. But I’ve been waiting for that for a long time.”

The energy sphere began to flash, faster and faster like a strobe light. Gamma Energy poured into their body. The Hulk roared deep and loud enough that the whole store shook with him.

“Goodbye, Hulk,” Banner said as everything lit up in a blinding green glow. “I win.”

***

The shockwave caught them as they soared over the duck pond. It kicked them through the air, sending the car flipping end over end. Faith was slammed painfully in the back seat. Fortunately she had plenty of experience with that, so she knew to keep her muscles loose and not tighten up.

The General Lee kept spinning, and she bounced off the back of the front seats, then was slammed against the rear window. The glass shattered and Faith was thrown from the car. Her left arm and shoulder hit the ground first. She didn’t even have time to process the sharp pain before her head whipped to the side and smacked into the ground. The loud bang sounded like it came from inside her skull and her vision blurred.

The slayer was a creature of instinct, and it didn’t stay down when injured. Faith scrambled onto her feet just in time for the secondary explosion. It was phenomenally bright and green. Even though Faith was facing away from the blast, the light seemed to dig through the back of her head and into her eyeballs. The energy and the boiling heat poured through her, burning every cell in her body to a charred crisp. For a moment she thought she was dead and looking down on herself through a distant window. Every atom in her body split apart, leaving a momentary hole in the universe. The gamma energy poured into the hole, filling it like rushing water. Then her body came back together, trapping the energy like a cork.

The hallucination didn’t last long enough for her to scream. The light and pain were suddenly gone, and it was just Faith on a dusty field. She blinked a few times and took a tentative breath. The air was uncomfortably hot in her lungs. Faith swung her left arm back and forth a few times, testing its mobility, then felt along the side of her head. She’d thought that she broke her arm and cracked her skull when she hit the ground, but everything felt fine now. In fact, she felt great. Even the bruises and aches from Mama Bell Grande were gone.

The General Lee had come to a stop about a hundred feet away. It had been protected from the secondary blast by a drainage ditch. Faith walked towards them. The shockwave probably would have killed everyone else, but they’d been surrounded by over three-thousand pounds of 1970s Detroit steel. That car could go over farmers markets like speed bumps. It also had plenty of experience at soaring through the air. Plus it was possessed by a thousand-year-old teenage demon, which really wanted to impress a bunch of hot girls. She bet they’d all be fine. Her guess proved correct when Drusilla climbed out of the car, pulling a slightly dazed Andy behind her. Candi was climbing out just as Faith reached them.

“My store…” Andy had climbed out of the ditch and was looking back. An empty crater stretched out behind them. It was just about the same size as the MaxMart property line, having taken out the building and surrounding parking lots. The unnatural emptiness of the crater was giving Faith a bad case of Sunnydale deja vu. They were lucky that this was a mostly rural and sparsely populated area.

“My store...” Andy muttered again. Her voice was shaking and she looked paler than Drusilla. She might be going into shock.

“Is he alive?” Candi asked, ignoring her sister. “Did Gay-Pride Hulk survive that?”

Faith’s eyes scanned the empty crater. It looked dead. Nothing was moving out there. She shook her head.

“He can’t truly die,” Drusilla whispered. “There will always be a piece of Gay-Pride Hulk living in us. Right here.” She placed her hand over her unbeating heart.

That sounded pretty stupid to Faith, and she socked Drusilla in the nose. The vampire rolled into the drainage ditch. Andy broke out of her stupor and went scrambling after Drusilla. Faith was just about to jump after them when a horn sounded and a pair of headlights lit them up. A stretched limousine rolled to a stop in front of the group. A fleet of construction trucks and cement mixers followed, forming a long line like a funeral procession. The trucks rolled past the limousine, and the cement mixers began to back up to the crater while making loud beeps.

Andy had her arm around Drusilla’s shoulder and was helping the dazed vampire climb out of the ditch. She was staring at Faith like she was some kind of psychopath, but Faith was used to that look.

The back door to the limousine opened and a short slender woman emerged. She was maybe sixty years old, with white hair, well-preserved skin and an expensive business suit. “That will be quite enough,” she said in a clipped tone.

“Who are you?” Candi asked.

“My name is Ms. Francis Hightower. I am in the Chief Business Development Officer of the MaxMart Corporation.” She glared at Faith. “You will immediately cease all current and future assaults on MaxMart employees and vacate our property.”

“She’s a vampire,” Faith said.

“She is a member of this corporation, and is afforded all privileges and protections that entails.”

“Ms. Hightower,” Andy stuttered as she stepped forward, still helping to support Drusilla. “It’s an honor to meet you. I’m Andy Jackson, I was a clerk at…”

“We know who you are, Ms. Jackson. We also know you, Ms. Drusilla. We have been monitoring both of your actions tonight, and we have been impressed by the dedication you showed towards the MaxMart Corporation and its values. The board unanimously agreed that both of your talents are wasted in clerk positions. We would like to extend an invitation to join us at MaxMart Headquarters.”

“We’re going to MaxMart Headquarters?” Andy squealed. “You’re promoting us?”

Francis smiled and nodded.

Andy looked like she might start bouncing in excitement, but she suddenly paused and looked back towards the crater. “Wait… What about my store?”

“It will be rebuilt,” Francis said. And the trucks were already pouring fresh cement into the crater. “Not just a regular MaxMart. This is the site of the next Maximum MaxMart. In two weeks it’ll be the largest retail center for three-hundred miles in any direction.”

“Oh, Joy!” Drusilla said as she stepped away from Andy. “I get to work in an office! Or maybe even a cubicle! Can I still learn to be not racist?”

“Not if you want to make it in corporate America,” Francis said.

Drusilla shrugged like that wasn’t too important. Francis opened the limo door and the two girls rushed inside.

“Wait,” Faith said as she stepped forward. An anger deep inside her started to rise and her voice dropped an octave. “Faith came to kill vampire.”

“And I’ve already told you that will not be happening,” Francis said as she turned her back on Faith. “This land remains the property of MaxMart, and you are to vacate it at once. Furthermore, due to your actions against the MaxMart Corporation and its values, you are hereby permanently banned from all MaxMart properties and subsidiaries.”

Faith gritted her teeth. This was nearly the exact circumstances that got her a lifetime ban from all Taco Bells. This wasn’t fair. It made her angry.

“You have one-minute to leave this property,” Francis continued. “After that the MaxMart Corporation will take legal action against you and The Watcher’s Council that employs you.”

Faith’s hands tightened into fists. She wasn’t going to let them get away with this. She had come here to smash that vampire. Her vision started to blur.

“Hey,” Candi’s hand grasped Faith’s shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. “You okay? You’re looking a little sickly.”

Faith shook her head and pushed the anger back down. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t usually like this. She’d catch up to Drusilla later, in better circumstances.

Francis had walked away without realizing how close she’d been cutting it. She climbed into the limo and closed the door with a final thump. They did a U-Turn and drove away.

Faith sighed, then walked back to the General Lee and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Candi came running after her. “Can I come with you?”

“I hunt demons,” Faith said. “It’s dangerous.”

“But don’t you need a beautiful blonde physicist bisexual stripper sidekick that only wears sexy lingerie?”

Faith only needed to think about it for a few seconds. “Hell yes I do! I bet you’d make a great watcher. Get in.”

Candi giggled as she climbed into the passenger seat. “This is going to be so much fun.”

Faith let out a deep growl of agreement, and the two of them drove off towards the rising sun.

*** Fini ***

Hello again, friends! It’s me, Andrew. I’m back to read some closing author’s notes. I’ve got them printed out here, but it’s mostly just several pages of the author apologizing over-and-over for writing this and promising that he’ll never do anything like this again. There’s also a thinly veiled plea for reviews, which we’ve all seen a thousand times. Honestly, it’s a little boring. Here’s a riddle instead:

Who would win in a fight, Magneto vs. Godzilla? Think carefully before saying anything, young padawans. The correct answer may surprise you.


End file.
